Working through findings

The inspector

Findings sit beside a live preview of the page. Choosing a finding highlights the element it is about, so you are never guessing which paragraph or which button is meant.

The list shows one finding open at a time. Closed findings are a single row saying what is wrong and where. Arrow keys move between them, which is the fastest way through a long list and works the same with a keyboard as with a mouse.

What a finding tells you

Each one carries:

• What is wrong, in plain language rather than a rule name.
• Where it is, in readable terms — the element and the words on it, like span.first-title — “About the Conference” — rather than a long DOM path. The full path is still there, one click down.
• Its WCAG success criterion and severity: Critical, Serious, Moderate or Minor.
• Auto-detected or needs manual review.
• Who it affects, in a sentence. Not an abstraction — the specific people who hit this specific barrier.
• What happens next: whether the plugin can fix it, whether you need to, whether it belongs to your theme, or whether somebody has to look at it, with a sentence saying how.

Faults your theme repeats

A single mistake in a theme template becomes one finding per page. On a site of any size that is most of your total.

Findings of one check can be grouped by the markup behind them, so a fault your theme repeats on every page is judged once rather than once per page.

Setting one aside everywhere:

• requires a reason, recorded against the decision
• lists the pages it covers first, so you can see the blast radius
• needs permission to edit other people’s content
• can be withdrawn in one step from the False positives screen

Decisions survive re-scanning

A finding you set aside, and the reason you gave, stay with that finding across every future scan.

This was not always true. Earlier versions kept the decision only on the scan record that happened to be holding it, so the next scan quietly put the finding back with no sign anything had been discarded. If you are upgrading from such a version, existing dismissals are preserved first, then superseded findings are cleared out, in a single pass.

A sensible order

1. Site-wide fixes first. One switch can clear the same finding everywhere.
2. Grouped theme faults next. One decision, one fix, many pages.
3. Images, through the bulk editor rather than one at a time.
4. Everything else, critical and serious before moderate and minor.
5. Needs-a-person findings last, when you have time to think about them.

The coverage panel

At the foot of every findings list there is a link to what the checks cover and what they cannot. It documents all 41 checks. It is worth reading once, early, because it tells you where the automated part of this stops.