This guide takes you from an empty account to a completed accessibility scan with a downloadable report. Budget about fifteen minutes for your first run. Everything here applies to the free tier; nothing in this guide requires a paid plan or a credit card.
Before you begin
You will need three things: a Leovoid Client Portal account, the address of a website you are authorised to test, and a few minutes of uninterrupted attention while the crawler works. The scan itself runs on our infrastructure, so you can close the tab and come back, but the page selection step needs you present.
Authorisation matters more than people expect. Scanning a site you do not control is not merely impolite, it can look like reconnaissance to an intrusion detection system. If you are an agency working on behalf of a client, get written confirmation before you add their domain.
What you do not need
You do not need to install anything, add a script tag to your site, or grant Leovoid access to your hosting. The scanner behaves like an ordinary visitor with a browser. You also do not need to verify domain ownership for your first website, though verification becomes relevant if someone else later claims the same domain.
Adding your first website
From the dashboard, choose Websites in the sidebar, then Add Website. You will be asked for a business name and a hostname. The business name is purely for your own organisation; it appears in listings and on report covers. The hostname is what actually matters.
Enter the registrable domain without a protocol and without a trailing path. Write example.gov rather than https://example.gov/services/index.html. Leovoid operates at the domain level because accessibility obligations attach to a site, not to an individual URL.
Subdomains are separate
A common surprise: blog.example.gov and example.gov are treated as distinct websites, each consuming one entity against your plan limit. This is deliberate. In real organisations, a subdomain is frequently run by an entirely different team, on different software, with a different budget and a different level of accessibility maturity. Collapsing them into one record would produce a score that describes nothing accurately.
If you genuinely manage both and want them assessed together, add them as two websites and compare the results side by side. A future release may introduce grouping, but conflating them automatically would be the wrong default.
The discovery crawl
Once a website is added, selecting Scan begins discovery. Leovoid loads your homepage in a real browser, follows internal links, and builds a tree of everything reachable. This is not a sitemap parse; pages that exist only behind JavaScript navigation will generally still be found, because the crawler executes scripts the way a visitor's browser would.
Discovery typically completes in under a minute for small sites and two to three minutes for larger ones. Very large sites are capped so that discovery does not run indefinitely.
What discovery cannot reach
Anything behind a login is invisible to the crawler today. Member portals, staff intranets, and authenticated dashboards will not appear in the tree. This is a known limitation and a planned capability, not an oversight. If gated content is central to your compliance obligations, an Expert Manual Review can cover it in the interim, since a human specialist can log in with credentials you supply.
Pages excluded by robots.txt are also skipped, as are PDFs and other non-HTML documents. Document accessibility is a genuinely different discipline with its own standards and its own remediation tooling.
Choosing which pages to scan
Discovery presents every page it found as a collapsible, searchable checkbox tree. Your plan determines how many pages can be included in a single scan: ten on Free, thirty on Starter, one hundred and fifty on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise.
The Select All control respects that cap automatically rather than letting you build a selection the server will later reject. The limit is also re-validated server side when the scan is submitted, because a limit enforced only in the browser is not enforced at all.
Which pages are worth your quota
Resist the urge to scan your homepage and call it done. Homepages are usually the most carefully designed and least representative page on any site. Prioritise instead:
- Any page containing a form, especially payment, registration, or service request forms
- Pages that fulfil a statutory obligation, such as public notices, meeting agendas, or records requests
- Search results and listing pages, which are frequently generated by templates nobody has audited
- Error pages, which are almost universally neglected
- At least one page from each visually distinct template on the site
That last point is the highest leverage advice in this guide. Most accessibility defects live in templates, not individual pages. Scanning fifty pages that all share one template tells you roughly what scanning one page would have told you.
Running the scan
With pages selected, choose Start Scan. Each selected page is loaded in a headless browser, rendered fully, and evaluated against automated accessibility rules. Because every page is genuinely rendered rather than statically parsed, dynamically injected content and client side rendered frameworks are assessed correctly.
Progress is shown live. Most scans finish in two to six minutes; a hundred page Professional scan may take closer to fifteen. You can navigate away and return, since the work happens on our infrastructure.
Cooldowns between scans
Free accounts can rescan a given website once every three days. Paid tiers have no cooldown at all. The cooldown is per website rather than per account, so a Free user with five websites can still scan a different one each day. Your Usage page lists exactly when each website becomes eligible again, down to the hour.
Reading your results
Results are organised by severity rather than by page, because a critical failure appearing on forty pages is one problem to fix, not forty. Each finding shows the rule that was violated, the specific elements affected, the WCAG success criterion it maps to, and which groups of users are impacted in practice.
Colour contrast findings include live swatches showing the actual foreground and background colours alongside the measured ratio and the ratio required, so you can judge severity without leaving the page.
Understanding the score
Your score is severity weighted out of one hundred, calculated across fifty WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria. It is deliberately not a simple violation count. One missing form label typically excludes more people from completing a task than a dozen marginal contrast issues, and the weighting reflects that reality.
Scores appear only after a Leovoid specialist has reviewed and approved the scan. Until then, the status reads Automated Scan Complete and no figure is shown. This is intentional: an unreviewed automated number presented as a compliance score would be actively misleading.
What automated scanning cannot tell you
This is the most important section in this guide, and the one most readers skip.
Automated testing reliably catches somewhere between thirty and forty percent of real accessibility barriers. That figure is not a limitation of Leovoid specifically; it is the well documented ceiling for automated accessibility testing generally, and any vendor claiming meaningfully higher coverage is measuring something other than real barriers.
A machine can verify that an image has alt text. It cannot verify that the alt text is accurate, useful, or better than nothing. It can confirm a heading exists. It cannot judge whether the heading structure conveys the page's actual organisation. It can detect a keyboard trap in obvious cases and miss it entirely in subtle ones. It cannot assess whether an interaction is genuinely usable with a screen reader, because usability is not a property that survives being reduced to a rule.
Treat a clean automated scan as a floor, not a certificate.
What to do next
Fix the critical and serious findings first; they are ordered that way for a reason. Rescan once remediation lands to confirm the fixes took effect and nothing regressed.
When you are ready to close the gap automated tooling cannot reach, request an Expert Manual Review from the results page. A certified specialist tests the site by hand, including with actual assistive technology, and produces a report covering the barriers no scanner will ever find. That report is what a procurement officer or a regulator will actually want to see.