Understanding Your Accessibility Score
Introduction
Scan results tell you what’s wrong on your site, but not always how you’re doing overall.
Your Accessibility Score turns your results into a single number and letter grade, so you can see where you stand at a glance and know exactly what’s holding your grade back.
What Your Score Means
Every site gets a score from 0-100 and a letter grade from A+ to D:
- A+ – 97-100
- A – 93-96
- A- – 90-92
- B+ – 86-89
- B – 79-85
- B- – 72-78
- C+ – 66-71
- C – 60-65
- C- – 54-59
- D – 45-53
Even the roughest site still lands on a D, not an F. There’s always a next fix that moves you up a band.
How Your Score Is Calculated
Your score starts from your site’s confirmed accessibility issues, weighted by how much each one affects real users. A Critical issue pulls your score down more than a minor one.
Repeated instances of the same issue count with diminishing weight: the first one counts most, and each additional instance of that same problem adds less. A page with 200 instances of one issue isn’t scored as 200 separate problems.
Only confirmed issues count against the number. Issues still waiting on manual review don’t lower your score, but they do hold your grade’s ceiling down until you review them, so clearing that queue is worth doing.
The results of automated PDF scans factor in too, and can only pull the number down by a few points at most.
Your score reflects issues found by AAArdvark’s current scan engine. Each site runs one engine, shown as the Checker on the Site Dashboard: IBM Accessibility Checker, aXe Runner, or HTML Code Sniffer.
Your Grade Ceiling
Automated scans alone can only take a site up to a B. To reach B+ or higher, you’ll need to:
- Complete manual testing on a sample of your pages. The number of pages required scales with your site’s size: smaller sites test a larger share of their pages, and larger sites only need a representative sample, capped so it never becomes an unreasonable amount of work.
- Clear any open Critical issues.
- Review the queue of items the scanner flagged as needing manual review. The ceiling lifts gradually as you work through it, not all at once.
Where You’ll See Your Score
Once a site has been scanned, its grade turns up in a few places. The Dashboard Overview walks through each of these screens in full.
Workspace Dashboard
Every site row leads with its letter grade, labeled “as of last scan” (or “no grade yet” before the first scan). On a site with only one page added, the label reads “homepage grade” instead (see When Your Score Covers One Page).
Site Dashboard
The Accessibility Score panel shows the 0-100 number, the letter grade, your current ceiling (“ceiling: B”), a coverage label (Automated only, In testing, or Manually tested), and a “this quarter” change once the site has about 90 days of scan history. That figure compares today’s score with the score from roughly 90 days ago, not with the previous scan. On a site with only one page added, the panel is labeled Homepage Score instead.
Trend Report
A per-site screen tracking your score over time, opened from the View Trend Report link on your Site Dashboard. It starts with the last 30 days; the 90-day and 12-month views open up as more scan history builds. See the Trend Report guide.
PDF report
The exported PDF report carries a grade card (letter, 0-100, ceiling), a “how your grade is calculated” breakdown, and a progress-over-time page once the site has enough scan history. For a site with only one page added, it’s titled Homepage Accessibility Report.
When Your Score Covers One Page
If only one page of your site has been added to AAArdvark, usually your homepage, your grade describes that one page, not your whole site. The score is calculated the same way, but AAArdvark labels it so it isn’t mistaken for a full site audit:
- On the Site Dashboard, the grade is labeled Homepage Score, and a note under it says what the grade covers, for example “This grades your homepage only. Your sitemap lists 579 pages.”
- On the Workspace Dashboard, the label under the grade reads “homepage grade” instead of “as of last scan”.
- The PDF report is titled Homepage Accessibility Report and says “This report covers the homepage only.”
If the one page you added isn’t your homepage, the same places say Page Score, “page grade”, and Page Accessibility Report.
The note includes a page count when AAArdvark has one: the number of pages in your sitemap, or, if you haven’t imported a sitemap, an estimate from our crawler (“about N pages”). Without either, it simply says the grade covers your homepage only.
To get a grade for your whole site, add more pages. The note has an Add Pages button if your plan has room for more pages, or an Upgrade to Add Pages button if it doesn’t (shown to Owners and Administrators). See Adding Pages to a Site.
If your site really is a single page, and your sitemap lists just that one page, your grade already covers the whole site, so the regular labels are used.
What Your Score Reflects
Your Accessibility Score is a measure of progress, not a compliance certification. It reflects the issues AAArdvark’s scan engine can detect and verify automatically, plus what you’ve confirmed through manual review and testing.
A high score means you’re on top of the issues AAArdvark can find. It isn’t a guarantee that your site meets a particular accessibility standard, and it isn’t a substitute for the manual testing and real-user evaluation that full accessibility requires. Use your score to track progress and spot what to work on next, not as a certification that your site is accessible.