Honest Coverage

Automated accessibility testing has a real, bounded scope, and a11y-loop says so in every report rather than implying otherwise.

• Deque's own research puts automated coverage at ~57% of accessibility issues by volume across a 13,000+ page / ~300,000 issue study — but only ~31% of WCAG 2.2 AA success criteria have any automated rule at all, and only ~13% are reliably automatable end-to-end.

• A clean a11y-loop report means "no automatically detectable failures were found" — it is never a conformance or compliance claim, and the tool will not tell you your app is accessible, compliant, or free of legal risk. No single score is ever produced.
• Every run emits a generated manual-review checklist, scoped to the components actually built, naming the criteria that need a human and/or assistive-technology testing (screen reader behavior, descriptive quality of alt text and link text, logical reading order, caption/media alternative accuracy, cognitive accessibility) — the direct inverse of "no manual testing needed."
• axe-core's own incomplete results are surfaced as needsReview, not suppressed. See the benchmark write-up for a live example of two such findings being investigated and resolved rather than dismissed.
• SARIF caveat, stated honestly: GitHub Code Scanning only displays SARIF results that carry a file-path location. a11y-loop's findings are located by rendered URL + CSS selector, which Code Scanning drops on ingestion — a naive upload produces an empty Code Scanning view. SARIF output is provided for the Azure DevOps SARIF viewer, the VS Code SARIF extension, and other SARIF-consuming tooling; the JSON report remains the primary, complete format.
• Findings are tagged with the lowest WCAG version that contains them (2.0 / 2.1 / 2.2), so you can filter to the subset a given jurisdiction actually enforces — e.g. US ADA Title II and Section 508 to the 2.0/2.1 AA subset, EU EN 301 549 to 2.1 AA (moving to 2.2 AA around October 2026), NZ and UK to the full 2.2 AA set.

What this is not

a11y-loop does not claim compliance, does not guarantee accessibility, and does not replace manual testing or testing with assistive technology.

For the full, current statement (kept in sync with the project's own claim-honesty rules), see the README's Honest Coverage section.