Terms and liability

Normwacht is an automated measurement tool. It opens pages of a website in a browser and tests them against a subset of the WCAG success criteria using axe-core, an open-source testing engine.

Normwacht is not an audit, not a certification, not an accessibility statement, and not a guarantee of compliance with the European Accessibility Act or any other law. No result produced by this service constitutes evidence that a website is legally compliant.

Nothing on this website or in any report is legal advice. We do not assess whether your organisation falls within the scope of the European Accessibility Act, whether an exemption applies to you, what your obligations are, or what a regulator would conclude.

References to legislation, deadlines, enforcement and penalties are provided for general information and may be incomplete or out of date. For advice about your situation, consult a qualified lawyer.

Automated accessibility testing can reliably detect roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the WCAG success criteria. The remainder requires human judgement and cannot be established by software.

Examples of what we cannot detect: whether alternative text meaningfully describes an image, whether the reading order makes sense, whether a process can actually be completed with a screen reader, whether an error message is understandable, whether video captions are accurate.

A report with no findings therefore does not mean your website is accessible or compliant. It means our automated tests found nothing they are able to detect.

Where the service generates suggested code changes, those suggestions are produced by an AI language model. AI models make mistakes. A suggestion may be incorrect, incomplete, unsuitable for your specific code, or may introduce new problems including broken functionality or new accessibility failures.

Every suggestion is a proposal, never an instruction. You must review and test each change before applying it to a live website. We do not apply changes to your website ourselves and we do not deploy code on your behalf.

You are responsible for what you deploy. We accept no liability for the consequences of applying a generated suggestion, including but not limited to broken functionality, lost revenue, data loss, or continued non-compliance.

You remain solely responsible for the accessibility of your website, for meeting your legal obligations, for publishing an accessibility statement where required, and for any dealings with a regulator.

You confirm that you are entitled to have the websites you submit scanned. Do not submit websites you neither own nor manage.

Our scanner reads pages as an ordinary visitor would. It does not log in, submit forms, or modify anything. It requests pages at a moderate rate, but you remain responsible for your own hosting capacity.

The service is provided as is. We do not warrant that it is free of errors, that it detects every detectable issue, that it is available without interruption, or that its results are complete or accurate.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect or consequential loss, including fines or penalties imposed by any authority, legal costs, lost revenue, lost data, reputational harm, or the cost of remediation.

Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid for the service in the three months preceding the event giving rise to the claim. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law.

For a scan we store the address you submitted, the pages we visited, the findings, and short fragments of the HTML that caused each finding. Those fragments come from publicly accessible pages and may incidentally contain text that appears on those pages.

A free scan report is kept for seven days and then deleted. Scans that belong to an account are kept for as long as the account exists, so you can see whether things are improving. The daily measurements of the watch are kept for 90 days.

We do not sell your data. We do not scan pages behind a login. If you want a report removed sooner, ask us and we will delete it.

If you leave your email address for the waiting list, we keep that address, the subscription you picked and the site you had scanned, until you unsubscribe or we tell you the subscription exists. We do not sell it on and use it for nothing else; one reply and we delete it.

A subscription is a service for businesses: whoever subscribes does so in the course of their trade or profession.

You pay per site per month, in advance, through Stripe. The prices are listed with the plans on the homepage and exclude VAT. Anything marked ‘in development’ there is not part of the subscription.

What each plan delivers is listed with the plans at the moment you subscribe: the daily check, the full scan every month or every week, and the record. Sections 1 to 3 apply here too: a measurement is not a verdict and not a guarantee.

You cancel whenever you like, in your account. The subscription runs until the end of the period you paid for; we do not refund a month in progress.

If a payment fails, Stripe tries again. If payment does not come through, the subscription and the following of your sites stop; your earlier scans stay in your account.

If we raise the price, we let you know at least one month in advance, so you can cancel before the new price applies.