For agencies looking after many client sites
Sites drift out of accessibility every time a page changes.
Covrane crawls a client site, runs axe-core over every page it reaches, and groups what it finds by template — so one broken header is one item to fix, not three hundred rows to read. Every status change is written down with its date and author.
Automated testing finds a portion of what is wrong. Off-the-shelf axe-core finds 63% of a fixture built to be measured; we find 100%, and we publish the fixture so you can check. See the benchmark.
Drawn, not measured — this is what recurring scans are for. Five findings, steady for three months, then a new homepage template ships and the count goes to 41 overnight.
Covrane scans on demand today. Catching a jump like that on the next scheduled scan, rather than when a client notices, is what we are building next.
The flagged weeks carry a notch as well as a colour. Severity told by colour alone is one of the things Covrane reports, so it is not something this page does either.
The problem
A site is checked once, signed off, and then it changes.
Nothing about an audit survives the next deploy. The ways a site slips are ordinary and constant:
- A new hero image ships without an alt attribute.
- A theme update drops the contrast on every secondary button.
- A form gains a field, and the field gains no label.
- A carousel is swapped for one that cannot be operated from the keyboard.
With ten client sites, re-checking by hand is a chore you keep putting off. With forty, it is not a job anyone does. So nobody notices the regression — until a client asks, or until a letter arrives.
The method
Scan the whole portfolio, report it as work.
- Scan
- On demand, across the whole site. Covrane crawls a client site and runs axe-core over every page it reaches, up to the page limit you set. You start a scan when you want one; scheduled re-scanning and week-over-week comparison are what we are building next, and are not here yet.
- Group
- By template, not by page. One broken header repeated across a site is one thing to fix, not hundreds of rows to read.
- Track
- Status over time. Each finding moves from open to in progress to resolved, and every change is written down with its date and author. The log is append-only — a correction is a new note, never a quiet edit.
- Report
- A dated record. A PDF you can hand a client: what was found, when it was found, what was done about it, and what is still outstanding.
The limits
What automated testing cannot see.
100%
On a page seeded with 16 known defects, Covrane detects 16 — 10 of them by axe-core 4.13.0 and 6 by rules of our own, of which 3 are reported for a person to confirm rather than asserted. Measured on every build, and published.
The 6 we add are the ones a static analyser cannot reach — they need the browser driven rather than the markup read:
- Alt text that exists but says nothing — alt="image" passes every automated check.
- A modal that traps the keyboard, with no way back out.
- Reading order that contradicts what the page visibly shows.
- A video with no captions track.
- A form error shown only as a red border.
- A decorative image given a long, noisy description.
Nothing the fixture plants gets past us any more, and we would rather you read that as a fact about the fixture than as a fact about scanning. We chose the defects on that page, so reaching the top of it proves we can pass a test we set ourselves. A tool that implies it found everything is worse than no tool at all, because it tells you to stop looking. The measurements that are not about our own fixture, on sites nothing was tuned against, are published in the repository with every false positive left in.
Those need a person. Covrane does not replace an audit by someone who actually uses assistive technology, and it does not establish legal compliance with the ADA, the European Accessibility Act, Section 508, or any other law. It tells you what changed, when, and what a machine can prove about it.
Early access
Name a site and we will scan it for you.
There is no self-signup yet, on purpose: we want to work with a small number of agencies first and find out what breaks on real client portfolios. So we run the scans by hand. Tell us a site you look after and we will send you the report within two working days, in the shape of the sample report. No account, no call, and no obligation to do anything with it.
We scan up to 25 pages and send you the report. No account, and no sharing your address.