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Issue ranking and impact calculations

The Accessibility Auditor is designed to take all the hard work out of determining what issues are most impactful to your overall accessibility score.

Understanding the theory behind how issues are ranked and calculated can help you feel more connected to the insights you are receiving through the audit reports.

What issue categories appear in rule violations?

The issue categories that appear in the audit results fall within these classifications:

  1. Minor

  2. Moderate

  3. Serious

  4. Critical.

How are issues prioritized into a category?

Prioritization is determined by multiplying the issue category (impact) and frequency (occurrences) of issues.

Each issue category is assigned a specific numerical weight value.

The basic algorithm to determine the overall impact is:

Weight (Impact Level) x Number of Occurrences = Overall Accessibility Impact

Part of this calculation also depends on the volume of issues detected and the efficiency benefits of fixing repetitive issues.

Issue volume matters

While a Critical issue carries the highest weight, a high volume of Minor issues may end up out-ranking a low volume of Critical ones.

For example, 1000 Minor issues might be prioritized over ten Critical issues.

Efficiency of fixes

Addressing a repetitive issue (such as a template-level bug) often yields a greater overall improvement to the site’s accessibility score than fixing a unique, isolated error on a single URL.

How does the audit re-evaluate an updated page?

No page is ever intentionally excluded from an audit because the system always attempts to audit every page associated with a domain. This full scan ensures the site map is always up to date.

Custom views let you exclude or include audited pages from your accessibility results, but not the auditing process itself.

What constitutes an updated page is determined during the audit phase each time your site is audited.

During the initial audit, a unique hash is calculated for each page on your site. During a re-scan, the latest hash recorded for each page is compared with the page hash from the initial (or previous) audit. If the hashes are identical, the page is marked as unchanged by the system. It is not re-audited during the updated scan.

When a page is skipped, the hash is unchanged in the system’s record of the domain structure. If a page is updated as part of fixing a rule violation, it will be detected during subsequent scans because the page hash will differ from the system record.