Everything below reflects the current release (v1.0.0). From install to your first findings list is typically under ten minutes.
You need WordPress 6.0+ on PHP 7.4+, an administrator login, and the plugin zip plus licence key from your purchase email. The scanner reads your site the way a visitor does, so it works with any theme or page builder. One honest note before you begin: automated checks cover the auditable subset of WCAG — they find what a machine can test, and the report says so plainly.
Go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the zip from your purchase email, install and activate. It adds an Accessibility Auditor item to the admin menu.
Open Accessibility Auditor → Licence and paste the key from your purchase email into the licence box — it's a long code starting VPC1., so paste the whole thing into the textarea rather than typing it. Keys are domain-based — no account, no phoning home.
Press Run scan. The auditor fetches your published pages one at a time — the rendered HTML a visitor receives — and runs the six check groups: alt text, empty links and buttons, heading order, form labels, contrast and the lang attribute. A typical site finishes in a couple of minutes.
Findings arrive ranked critical → serious → moderate → minor, each naming the page and element, the WCAG 2.1 AA criterion it maps to, and a plain-English fix. Start at the top — criticals are the issues that block someone outright.
Most fixes are content edits — an alt text here, a button label there — and the finding tells you where. Rescan when you're done and watch the counts fall. That falling number is the story your report tells.
Under Report branding, add your agency logo, colours and name, plus the client's name. Generate the print-ready WCAG audit report — executive summary, scorecard, findings appendix, evidence footer — and print to PDF. Then switch on weekly rescans for the email summary and history trend.
The screens and numbers you'll actually live with.
Critical blocks a user completely (an unlabelled checkout button). Serious makes a task painful (body text failing contrast). Moderate breaks structure (heading jumps). Minor is polish. Work top down.
Best-effort by design: it computes text and background colours from the rendered page and flags likely failures against the 4.5:1 ratio. Gradients, background images and overlaps need a human eye — flagged results say so.
Every finding cites its criterion — 1.1.1 Non-text Content, 1.3.1 Info and Relationships, 1.4.3 Contrast, 3.1.1 Language of Page, 4.1.2 Name Role Value — the same numbering auditors and compliance letters use.
Executive summary for the business owner, scorecard for the meeting, findings appendix for the developer, evidence footer for the file. Generated from any scan, printed to PDF from the browser.
Every scan is kept. The trend chart shows total findings per scan over time — the falling line that proves the retainer is doing its job.
A background rescan runs weekly and emails you the summary: what's new, what's fixed, what's unchanged. New criticals are flagged at the top of the message.
One textarea, one Activate button. Paste the full VPC1.… key from your purchase email. The key covers the number of sites on your plan; move a site by deactivating on one and activating on another.