Automated accessibility monitoring means putting a site on a recurring scan so new WCAG issues surface on their own, instead of waiting for someone to remember to run a check. In wcagc you can now set any site to a recurring full-site scan: daily, weekly, or monthly, at a time you pick. Each run works exactly like a manual full-site scan: it crawls your pages, tests them against WCAG success criteria, and files the results in your scan history so you can compare one run to the next. The point is to catch regressions early (a new page with no headings, an image that shipped without alt text, a contrast change from a design tweak) close to when they happen, not months later during an audit. This guide covers what scheduled scans do, how to turn them on, how often to run them, and where automation stops and human review has to take over.
What are scheduled accessibility scans?
A scheduled scan is a saved instruction on a site: "run a full-site accessibility scan on this cadence, at this time." You set it up once. From then on the scan runs by itself and drops each result into the same place your manual scans go: the site's scan history and the results dashboard.
A few things worth knowing about how it works in wcagc:
- One schedule per site. Each site has a single schedule. You choose daily, weekly (pick a weekday), or monthly (pick a day of the month), plus a time of day.
- It reuses the normal full-site pipeline. A scheduled run is an ordinary full-site scan with no person attached: same crawler, same checks, same report. There's no separate "lite" scan behind it.
- Results are comparable. Because every run is a real scan in your history, you can open the latest one next to the previous one and see what changed.
Nothing about a schedule changes your live site. It's a measurement that runs on a timer. The fixing still happens in your code, on your terms.
How do I set up automated accessibility monitoring?
Open the site under Sites, find the Automatic scans section, and choose a frequency and time. Automatic scans are part of the Pro plan, so you'll set this up on a Pro subscription; on the free plan the section points you to upgrade.
The steps:
- Go to Sites and open the site you want to monitor.
- In Automatic scans, pick Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.
- For weekly, choose the weekday; for monthly, choose the day of the month.
- Set the time. Times are stored in UTC, and the form shows what that lands on in your own time zone.
- Save. The panel then shows your cadence and the next scheduled run.
You can edit, turn the schedule off temporarily, or delete it at any time. Turning it off keeps the settings but stops it running; deleting removes it entirely.
If your subscription later stops including automatic scans (say you move back to the free plan), the schedule is paused rather than deleted, so you don't lose the configuration. To start it again, upgrade and re-save the schedule.
What does a scheduled scan actually check?
The same machine-detectable issues any automated scan finds: missing alt attributes, empty links and buttons, form fields with no label, low colour contrast, a missing page language, some ARIA misuse. Running it on a schedule doesn't extend what automation can see. It just runs that check repeatedly so problems show up sooner.
This is the honest limit of any scanner, ours included. Automated testing covers part of WCAG, not all of it. Deque's review of more than 2,000 audits found automation identified about 57% of issues by volume, and estimates based on how many success criteria a tool can even evaluate put the figure closer to 30% (Deque). The W3C is just as plain: evaluation tools "can not determine accessibility, they can only assist in doing so" (W3C WAI).
So monitoring is good at one specific job: catching regressions in the machine-checkable layer between deeper reviews. It will tell you a new template shipped without labels. It won't tell you whether your checkout is usable end to end with a screen reader. That still needs a person.
How often should you scan: daily, weekly, or monthly?
Match the cadence to how often the site changes.
- Daily suits sites that deploy often or publish new content most days: a product app, a busy blog, a large store. Regressions get caught within a day.
- Weekly is a sensible default for most marketing sites and smaller apps. It's frequent enough to catch a bad deploy quickly without adding noise.
- Monthly works for stable, rarely-touched sites where you mainly want a periodic check that nothing has drifted.
A reasonable pattern is weekly automated scans for ongoing coverage plus a manual full-site scan whenever you ship something significant, and a proper human review before a milestone like an accessibility statement or an audit. Monitoring keeps the baseline honest between those bigger efforts.
Does monitoring replace a manual accessibility review?
No, and it isn't meant to. Automated monitoring is a safety net for the issues a machine can see; conformance with a standard like EN 301 549 or the WCAG level required by the EAA needs human testing on top: keyboard navigation, screen-reader flows, reading order, whether error messages make sense. A tool that claimed a schedule alone made a site conformant would be over-promising, and that's exactly the practice the US FTC penalised in the overlay market.
The right way to read a scheduled scan: it's a trend line for the automatable part of accessibility. A rising issue count is an early warning. A flat, low count is reassurance that recent changes didn't break the basics. Neither is a substitute for the manual work that confirms real conformance, and neither is a compliance certificate. It's a monitor. Used well, it keeps small regressions from piling up into a large, expensive backlog.
FAQ
Are scheduled scans available on the free plan?
No. Automatic scans are a Pro feature. On the free plan you can still run manual scans, including full-site scans; the schedule setup points you to upgrade.
How often can I scan a site automatically?
Daily, weekly, or monthly, at a time you choose. Each site has one schedule; the time is set in UTC and the form shows the equivalent in your local time zone.
Where do the results of a scheduled scan go?
Into the site's scan history and results dashboard, the same place manual scans appear. Each run is a full scan you can open and compare with the previous one.
What happens to my schedule if I downgrade?
It's paused, not deleted. Your cadence and time are kept. Upgrade again and re-save the schedule to resume automatic scans.
Does automated monitoring make my site compliant?
No. It finds machine-detectable issues on a recurring basis. Automation catches roughly 30 to 57% of issues; the rest, and any claim of conformance, needs manual review by a person.
Try it on your own site
You can see what a scan reports before setting up any schedule: run a free scan on a page now, then, on Pro, put the site on a weekly cadence so new issues surface on their own.
Written by Pavel Charkasau, founder of wcagc. Last updated 5 July 2026.
Sources
- Deque Systems — Automated testing study identifies 57% of digital accessibility issues (deque.com). Accessed 5 July 2026.
- W3C Web Accessibility Initiative — Selecting Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools (w3.org/WAI). Accessed 5 July 2026.
- W3C — Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) overview (w3.org/WAI). Accessed 5 July 2026.