How we measure
A measurement is only worth something if you know how it was done. This is exactly what happens when you enter an address, and what we deliberately leave alone.
What happens
A real browser, from inside the EU
We open your homepage in Chromium, the browser Chrome is built on, from a server in Dublin. Consent banners behave differently per country; a measurement from an American address sees something different from your European visitor.
Five pages, and your legal pages
From the homepage we follow the links closest to the front: the pages in your navigation, not the eighteenth product in a category. Then we specifically fetch your terms, contact, legal notice and privacy pages, because that is where the mandatory details usually are.
Before the visitor’s choice
We click nothing. So everything we see load, loads before consent: cookies, requests to trackers, local and session storage. Then we look for a consent banner and whether it has a reject button; if we see none, we look again two seconds later.
Accessibility at two widths
We test every page with axe-core, the open-source engine almost every auditor uses, on desktop and on mobile. On top of that we run four tests axe does not: setting the page to 320 pixels, going through it with real tab presses, and widening the text spacing to see what breaks.
A report in codes, read in your language
The report stores only codes and numbers, no sentences. That is why the same report opens in English, Dutch, German and French. A free report stays online for seven days; attached to an account, it does not expire.
What we never do
- Click ‘accept’: then we would measure after consent, and that is not what a regulator measures.
- Open a chat window, submit a form or log in.
- Install or change anything on your site. No widget, no script.
- Hide. In your server log we appear as Normwacht.
What a measurement is not
A measurement is not a legal opinion and not a certification. Some thirty to forty per cent of the accessibility criteria can be established by a machine; the rest takes a person. Whether a cookie is necessary, whether a number is right, whether a chat is answered by a person: we cannot see that, and the report says so.
With what
Chromium 153 through Playwright 1.63, axe-core 4.13, and our own tests for reflow, text spacing, focus, cookies, business details, reviews and chat windows.