Whose website is it, and why not a customer’s
It is the W3C’s Before and After Demonstration — a website the people who write the web accessibility standards built deliberately broken, so that tools and students can be tested against it.
We have scanned real shops, and we are not going to publish their names next to a list of their failures. That is somebody else’s house. A demo built to be scanned is the one site where showing the findings costs nobody anything.
What the scan found
- 5Issue types
- 88Elements affected
- 8Pages scanned
The interesting part is not the total. It is where the problems were. Two of those eight pages are the deliberately broken demo, and they hold all 88 elements between them. The other six pages are W3C’s own real pages, and they came back with nothing.
That is the check we most wanted to pass. A scanner that reports problems everywhere is not sensitive, it is useless — you would learn to ignore it by the third week. This one found the broken pages, and stayed quiet on the good ones.
What is missing from it, deliberately
The best part of the product is blank in this sample
Open the report and you will find a section called Since the last scan that contains an apology rather than a comparison. That is correct: this was a first scan, and there was nothing to compare it against.
A single scan tells you what is broken today. It cannot tell you whether last week’s fix held, or whether a theme update quietly added twelve new problems on Thursday. That is the thing we actually sell, and it only exists from the second scan onward. We would rather show you an honest sample with a hole in it than a convincing one we assembled ourselves.
One thing you will notice
Some of the scanned pages are not part of the demo at all — the scanner follows links within the same domain, and the demo sits inside the much larger w3.org. On a normal shop this is exactly what you want, because your pages link to your other pages. We are pointing it out because you would have spotted it yourself, and a tool that hopes you will not look closely is not worth having.
Your own would look like this
Same layout, your pages, your findings, arriving on a Monday. The first one is generated as soon as you sign up.