Accessible Web RAMP is designed to allow for automated accessibility scanning and monitoring of pages on your website. To do this, you first need to make sure that all the pages you want scanned are added to RAMP.
This article covers
Adjusting Your Analytics Account
Changing Your Default Scan Frequency
Adding Pages
RAMP will automatically search for pages to add after you add a website. However, you can add pages yourself if RAMP couldn’t find pages automatically. For in-depth instructions and troubleshooting help, see our article on adding pages.
- Navigate to the Pages tab and selecting Automatic (or Advanced) Page Discovery Mode in the setup guide.
- Alternatively, you can add pages individually by navigating to the Pages tab and clicking “Add.”
Once all the pages you wish to scan have been added to RAMP, you can adjust their scanning frequency to control how often RAMP automatically rescans them. Available page scanning frequencies include daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or “Don’t scan”.
All websites have a default scanning frequency, set within RAMP Settings > Automated Scanning, that you can change to adjust how often new pages will be monitored by default.
You can then also adjust page scanning frequency on individual pages if desired. This is done by navigating to your desired page from the Pages tab and selecting Edit Page Details.
Please note: each RAMP Account has a set number of available page scans per month. When a website’s page scan allowance has been exhausted, automatic page scans will be queued up for next month or whenever page scans become available again.
Within the RAMP Settings > RAMP tab, you can adjust the WCAG version & level that the scanner checks your site against. We recommend WCAG 2.2, Level AA.
Remember to Adjust Your Analytics Account
If you have analytics on your website, like Google Analytics, remember to filter out our Accessibility Bot from your data. Otherwise, you will see it as real traffic on your site. Learn how to filter out the Accessibility Bot from analytics.
Changing Your Default Scan Frequency
You can change the frequency at which new pages will scan by using the dropdown in the Automated Scanning tab under “Default Scan Frequency”
Please note: changing this setting will not affect the scanning frequency of pages already in RAMP unless you check the checkbox that appears below the field.
You may also change the scanning frequency for current pages directly from the pages tab.
Viewing Scan Results
The scan results are attached directly to the pages within RAMP. You can navigate to a page through the Pages tab.
Scanning Errors
If our scanner encounters an error, it may decide to remove the page’s eligibility for automatic scanning. You will know that this is the case if you see and “X” next to the page in the Pages tab. An error may be one of the following.
- Invalid status code.
- This happens if the page returns a 404, or any other status code our scanner deems unfit for future scanning.
- Aborted, possibly due to unsupported content.
- Something about the content type of the page didn’t allow for proper scanning. This will often happen if you try to scan a PDF, or CSV, for example.
- Too many redirects.
- Occurs if a redirect loop is detected.
- Domain not resolved.
- If your domain is not properly resolved to an IP address.
- Different hostname.
- To make sure that we aren’t scanning external websites, we verify that the hostname of your website is the same page we land on. This means that we only scan pages that live on your website. It’s important to know that the hostname www.example.com, is considered a different website than example.com in this comparison. So make sure that your primary domain is set up properly.
For more information on common site scanning issues, visit Troubleshooting Page Scanning Issues.
Troubleshooting & Frequently Asked Questions
Have questions you aren’t seeing the answers to? Get in contact with us.
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My site currently has an overlay on it that performs DOM manipulation. How does RAMP handle this situation?
RAMP’s accessibility scanner tries its best to scan a webpage in the exact state that a typical new user will see it in. This means that if you have an overlay on your website, our scanner will attempt to load that overlay and the changes it makes to the HTML.
However, due to the way the overlay widgets work we may end up scanning the page before the DOM manipulation occurs. Here are some more technical details about this:
Knowing when a webpage is fully loaded is actually a difficult problem to solve. For example, a page might “look” fully loaded but actually there is a big gif loading in the background that suddenly pops into view 5 seconds later. Or maybe a webpage is in a continual state of loading, say, with a live chat that’s constantly loading in new chats. Or an analytics service sending pings to and from the browser every few seconds. How can you know which network requests will update the page and which won’t? You mostly can’t!
Because of this, our scanner has to draw the line in the sand somewhere and say “this is what a fully loaded web page looks like”. For our scanner, we define a webpage as “loaded” when there are 2 or fewer pending network requests (think loading images, stylesheets, gif, fonts, analytics, data fetching, etc) OR we’ve waited for 2 minutes (subject to change) and the page hasn’t made any significant progress. Once one of those conditions are met, we do our best to test the webpage in whatever state it may be in.
It’s important to note that the “final 2″ network requests are typically things like third party analytics or, sometimes, may be your overlay scripts. If overlay scripts are particularly heavy and are consistently some of the last things to load (and execute!!) on your website, you may experience “flaky” testing within RAMP depending on whether that overlay script was fully loaded or not.
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Why am I still not seeing pages from my website show in RAMP?
If you are not seeing any pages within 24 hours after adding your sitemap to your Website Settings, then there may be a problem scanning your sitemap. Make sure that the sitemap you have specified is accessible to all users (ie. not behind any authentication), and that it contains valid sitemap xml. If you have verified those items, then your site may be blocking our bot. Make sure you don’t have any entries in your robots.txt file that would block our bot from reaching your sitemap. You can learn more about our bot here.
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Why aren’t pages from my website showing up in RAMP?
Our bot currently scans sites for new pages twice a day, this is subject to change, but may be the reason you aren’t seeing the page yet. If the page still isn’t showing up after 24 hours, make sure that the page is present in the sitemap that you have specified in your Website Settings.
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What is “Active Scanning Job” and how does Accessible Web RAMP schedule scanning jobs?
“Active Scanning Job” will show the current, automatically scheduled scanning job being processed. Accessible Web RAMP will periodically check your website for pages that need to be scanned based on the what you have specified as their preferred scanning frequency, and when they were last scanned. When it finds one, it will group it with other pages that are also due (or close to due) and scan them together in a “scanning job”. You can expect new pages to be scanned (or at least scheduled in a scanning job) within an hour of them being detected. If you manually request a single page to be scanned, you can expect the scan to complete much quicker than this, likely within 5 minutes.
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What rules are being checked during the accessibility scan?
Accessible Web uses Axe Core to perform accessibility scans of the pages you request. We run the scan on your page and check for violations of WCAG 2.1 AA by default. If you would like to change the rules that we are checking for, you can adjust these settings in the RAMP Settings tab of you website. We support WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 in A, AA and AAA, as well as best practices.
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Is there a way to manually trigger a scan of a page?
Yes! Navigate to the page within your RAMP account, and click the Scan Page button.