A free accessibility check of your online shop

Write to Validiscan with the address of your shop and, if you know it, its platform. The button at the top of this page opens a short form that sends your message to Validiscan; without JavaScript, it opens a prepared email instead. You can also write to the address shown with it. Nothing starts automatically: William Quaade Rasmussen, who runs Validiscan, starts each check himself and answers by email.

The free check is an automated scan of up to 15 pages of your shop, each loaded at desktop size and at phone size. Validiscan writes back with the failures the scan can prove. For each failure you get:

• what fails, named by the rule that found it;
• a page where it occurs;
• the HTML of the failing element;
• the WCAG success criteria it fails;
• its impact on your customers: critical, serious, moderate or minor.

You also get the number of failures for each impact. Only failures against a WCAG success criterion are counted; good-practice suggestions are left out.

The pages are chosen by type: the home page, product lists, product pages, search results, the login page, content pages, legal pages and other pages. The check finds them through your sitemaps and the links on your pages.

The free check is run by ValidiscanBot, Validiscan’s crawler. ValidiscanBot names itself in every request, loads one page at a time, waits at least 1 s between the requests it starts itself to your shop, and follows the robots.txt of your shop’s host, with the exceptions described below.

• User agent. Every request carries ValidiscanBot/1.0 (+https://validiscan.com; info@validiscan.com), except in the phone-size pass, where the same string ends in the word Mobile: ValidiscanBot/1.0 (+https://validiscan.com; info@validiscan.com) Mobile.
• One page at a time. It loads at most 15 pages in its browser, one after the other, each at 1440 by 900 pixels and at 390 by 844 pixels. To choose those pages, it first makes plain requests outside the browser, for your home page, robots.txt, sitemaps and candidate pages, so it makes more requests than it loads pages.
• Gaps between requests. Each request it starts itself to your shop waits until at least 1 s have passed since the previous one started and since that one was answered. For a page load in the browser, answered means that the page’s response has arrived. A longer Crawl-delay in your robots.txt is followed, up to 10 s. The files a page loads itself, such as styles, scripts and images, load as in any browser, without that gap.
• robots.txt. Its first request is for your home page, following any redirect, to see whether the shop answers and which platform it runs on. Then it reads the robots.txt of the host the home page ended on. If robots.txt disallows the home page for ValidiscanBot, or cannot be read because the server answers with a server error (5xx), with 429 (too many requests) or not at all, the check stops there and nothing else is requested. Otherwise it loads no page and no frame of your shop that robots.txt disallows, and checks sitemaps, candidate pages and every redirect of its plain requests against it too.
• Where robots.txt is not checked. When your shop answers a page load in the browser with a redirect, the browser follows it at once, without the gap and without checking robots.txt; Validiscan has recorded this as a known gap in its scanner. ValidiscanBot also reads only the robots.txt of your shop’s host: a page on another host name of the same domain that your shop links to, such as blog.example.com next to www.example.com, can be included without that host’s robots.txt being read.
• Nothing bought, nothing sent. It never adds a product to a cart, never opens the checkout, sends no forms and leaves your shop’s fields as they were: one check simulates pasting into a password field, to see whether the shop allows it, and then restores the field. Search results are opened by their address.
• Inside its own browser. It operates pages as a visitor would: it moves through them with the keyboard, tests your cookie banner and then accepts it so the rest of the page can be tested (to try how the banner is closed with the keyboard, it opens the page again in a fresh browser window without cookies), and on product pages it switches to another variant and then back. Your pages’ own scripts may react to this as they would for any visitor, for example by recording the cookie choice. Its browser sends no requests to a list of known analytics, advertising and chat services, and loads no video or audio files.

If you want the failures fixed in your shop’s code, a project starts with a baseline scan of your shop, which needs your written permission and covers the cart and the first checkout step. Validiscan quotes each project for the shop. Tell Validiscan about your storefronts and theme, and it comes back with a clear, fixed quote.