Configure the App Accessibility rule engine

Learn how to set the WCAG conformance level, select rules and categories, and toggle rule sets across your organization.

Configure the App Accessibility rule engine to enforce a WCAG conformance level, standardize which rules and categories apply, and toggle best practices and experimental rule sets across your organization.

For more details, see the scope, options, and impact of rule engine configuration.

Prerequisites

• You must have Owner or Admin access to your BrowserStack account.

Configure the rule engine

To configure the rule engine:

1. Log in to the App Accessibility dashboard.
2. Click Settings.
3. Under Rule Engine Configuration, turn on the Enable custom rule engine configuration toggle.
   
4. From the WCAG version dropdown menu, select the conformance level to enforce, for example, WCAG 2.1 AA.
5. Under RULES, select an entire rule category by selecting the checkbox next to it, or expand a rule category to select individual rules within that category.
6. Toggle Include Best Practices issues to control whether Best Practice rules contribute to issues.
7. Toggle Include Experimental rules to control whether Experimental rules contribute to issues.
8. Click Save Settings to enforce the configuration across your organization.
   To discard your changes, click Reset to default.

After you save your settings, a confirmation banner indicates that the scan settings are now enforced for all users in the organization.

Implementation details

After you save the configuration, the following changes are implemented in your test sessions:

• The rule configuration is enforced across the organization for both Workflow Analyzer and App Accessibility automated test runs.
• In the Scan Settings prompt during a Workflow Analyzer test session:
  • The WCAG version dropdown menu, the Include Best Practices issues toggle, and the Include Experimental rules toggle become read-only.
  • In the Rules dropdown menu, the rules disabled by your admin are greyed out and cannot be selected. A note at the top of the Scan Settings prompt indicates that certain rules are enforced by the admin configuration.
• For automated tests, the organization-level configuration overrides the wcagVersion, bestPractice, experimentalRules, excludeRule, and excludeRuleCategory keys set in the user-level accessibilityOptions. Automated test reports explicitly list the rules excluded by the admin configuration.
• The Include Needs Review issues toggle remains user-controlled in each Workflow Analyzer session, and the needsReview key continues to apply in automated test runs.

Roll back configuration changes

If a saved configuration introduces noise or hides critical issues, roll back the changes using the following steps:

1. Log in to the App Accessibility dashboard.
2. Click Settings.
3. Under Rule Engine Configuration, restore the WCAG version, rule selections, and rule-set toggles to your previous configuration.
4. Click Save Settings to apply the changes.

The reverted settings apply only to sessions and automated test runs that start after you save the changes.

Related links

• Impact of rule engine configuration
• Rule repository