How to run an audit on any page
An audit in Complaudax is a snapshot of one page at one moment, taken by the detection engine running inside your browser. This page covers running that snapshot, reading it honestly, and filing it so the next audit can be compared against it.
Run the audit
- Navigate to the page you want to test and get it into the state you care about: the form half filled, the menu open, the error message showing. The audit tests the page as it is right now, not as it loads.
- Open the Complaudax side panel and check the WCAG target. It defaults to WCAG 2.2 AA. Switch to 2.1 AA if that is what the client contract names.
- Press Run audit on this page. Complaudax walks every frame it can reach and reports back grouped by success criterion.
Pages behind a login
This is the case most tools cannot cover. External crawlers see the signed out marketing site and stop at the login form, which leaves the account area, the checkout, and the whole staging environment untested. Because Complaudax runs in the session you are already signed in to, those pages are ordinary pages to it. There is nothing to configure and no credentials to share. More on authenticated audits.
The panel offers a checkbox to mark the result as an authenticated page, and that wording carries through into the conformance report so the reader knows which parts of the site were actually reachable.
Read the results
Findings are grouped by the WCAG success criterion they fail, each with the rule that caught it, the number of affected elements, a plain-language description, and a link to the fix guidance. Severity follows the four levels the engine reports:
- Critical, a barrier that blocks use of the feature outright.
- Serious, a barrier that makes a task difficult or unreliable.
- Moderate, a problem that degrades the experience.
- Minor, a defect worth cleaning up but rarely blocking.
Fix critical and serious findings first, re-run the audit to confirm, then work down. Severity is a triage aid from the engine, not a legal ranking: a moderate finding on a checkout button matters more than a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Coverage warnings are not noise
Two notices are worth reading rather than dismissing. A partial audit means a frame could not be reached, and the panel lists which origins were skipped so you can decide whether to grant access and re-run. A cross-origin iframe notice means an embedded third-party widget was outside the audit boundary. Both are recorded on the audit and surface in the report, because a document that quietly omits the parts that were never tested is worse than no document.
File the result to a site
Press Save to a site and choose the client and site. Complaudax reconciles the new findings against that site's existing ledger and tells you what changed:
- New, issues seen for the first time.
- Still open, issues found again and unchanged.
- Fixed, issues previously open and no longer detected, with the date.
- Regressed, issues that had been fixed and have come back.
If you were not signed in, or you were not sure which site the page belonged to, the audit lands in Audits under the Unassigned tab. Assign it later and the same reconciliation runs then.
Finish with the manual checklist
Roughly half of the WCAG success criteria can be checked by software. The rest need a person: keyboard operability, focus order, meaningful sequence, error handling, and anything that depends on understanding what the content means. Each site carries a manual checklist for its WCAG target where you record pass, fail, not applicable, or leave it untested, with notes.
Reports distinguish what software verified from what a person verified, so nothing implies more evidence than you actually gathered. When the ledger and the checklist are current, generate the documents: see conformance reports and statements.
Common questions
Can Complaudax audit a page behind a login?
Yes. The audit runs inside your own browser session, so whatever you can see, it can test: dashboards, checkout steps, account settings, and staging environments behind basic auth or a VPN. There are no crawler credentials to hand over.
What does a partial audit mean?
It means at least one frame on the page could not be reached, usually a cross-origin iframe such as an embedded payment form or map. Complaudax records which origins were skipped and marks the audit partial so the coverage gap is visible in the report rather than hidden.
What happens to an audit I did not assign to a site?
It waits in the Audits section under Unassigned. Assign it to a site at any time and it reconciles against that site's ledger, or discard it if it was a throwaway check.
Will a new audit overwrite my manual decisions?
No. If you marked an issue as a false positive or as will not fix, later audits leave that verdict alone. Only issues the engine is tracking move between open, fixed, and regressed.
How many audits can I run?
As many as the work needs. There are no audit counts or page quotas on any plan, including Free.
Keep reading
- Conformance reports and statements
- WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 explained plainly
- Auditing authenticated and staging pages