The issue list is the part you act on. Each entry describes one kind of problem, where it appears, and how serious it is.
The four severities
- Critical. Blocks someone from using part of your site. An unlabelled form field, a control that cannot be reached by keyboard, an image carrying essential information with no description.
- Serious. Makes something substantially harder. Poor contrast on body text, a link whose purpose is impossible to work out, a badly structured table.
- Moderate. Causes friction rather than failure. Heading levels that skip, a missing page language.
- Minor. Worth tidying, unlikely to stop anyone.
Show the Unique Issues Found section with issues grouped by severity (Critical, Serious, Moderate, Minor) and instance counts next to each.
What the counts mean
An issue usually shows how many places it occurs. One issue appearing eighty times is normally one mistake in a shared template, not eighty separate problems. That is good news: fixing it once fixes all of them. When you are deciding what to do first, a high count is a sign of a cheap win, not a big job.
What to fix first
- Critical issues in your templates. Highest severity, widest reach, usually one fix.
- Anything on a form. Forms are where an accessibility problem stops someone buying, booking or contacting you.
- Anything on your most visited pages. Severity matters, but so does how many people meet it.
- The rest, by severity.
Resist working top to bottom through the list. The order that clears the most real harm is rarely the order things happen to be listed in.
Sharing the work
Issues usually split cleanly between two groups. Content problems, such as missing alternative text or unhelpful link text, belong to whoever writes the pages. Structural problems, such as contrast, keyboard access or markup, belong to whoever builds the site. Splitting the list that way before handing it over saves a lot of back and forth.
Then scan again
Once you have made changes, run another scan to confirm them, and use Compare Scans on the website's page to see which issues are resolved. On a paid plan you can do that immediately. On Free there is a three day wait.