Rule engine configuration: scope, options, and impact

Understand how enforcing a WCAG conformance level and rule-set toggles affects scan coverage, compliance mapping, and reporting across your App Accessibility dashboards.

Configuring the App Accessibility rule engine standardizes accessibility checks across your organization. You can enforce a WCAG conformance level, select the rules and categories that apply, and toggle whether Best Practice and Experimental rules contribute to issues.

These configuration changes directly affect the following metrics in App Accessibility reports:

• Issue counts
• Accessibility scores
• Compliance claims
• Trend comparability

Key impacts of rule engine configuration

Configuring the App Accessibility rule engine has the following effects:

• Issue counts and score: Disabling rules, rule categories, or the Best Practice and Experimental rule sets reduces reported issues and can inflate accessibility scores. Changing the WCAG conformance level changes the specific set of rules that run during each scan.
• Cross-tool impact: Organization-level rule engine configurations override user-level rule selections in Workflow Analyzer sessions and automated test runs. However, the Include Needs Review issues toggle remains user-controlled per session.
• Organizational scope: Changes to the rule engine configuration apply to the entire organization. Only owners and admins can modify these settings or revert them to the defaults.
• Compliance mapping: Compliance assertions, such as “WCAG 2.2 AA compliant,” must accurately reflect your configured scope. Disabling core rules can invalidate your compliance claims.
• Trends and baselines: Historical comparisons might become inconsistent after configuration changes. To maintain accurate tracking, establish new baselines or document the dates when your configuration changed.
• Dashboards and APIs: Build summaries from automated tests, session reports from Workflow Analyzer, and API responses all reflect the rule set that was active at the time of the scan.

Scope of rule engine configuration

When you configure the rule engine at the organization level, the configured rule set applies to:

• Workflow Analyzer: All sessions started after the change.
• Automated tests: All test runs initiated after the change.

Sessions and test runs that started before the change continue using their original rule set until they complete.

Rule engine configuration options

• Set the WCAG conformance level: Enforce a specific WCAG version, such as WCAG 2.2 AA, across the organization.
• Enable or disable rules and categories: Select entire rule categories, or expand a category to manage individual rules.
• Toggle best practices and experimental rules: Control whether best practices and experimental rules are included in scans.

Use cases for rule engine configuration

• Enforce a single WCAG conformance level: Set an organization-wide WCAG standard, such as 2.2 AA, to ensure every team tests against the same standard.
• Reduce noise and focus on critical issues: Disable specific rules or rule categories, or turn off Include Experimental rules and Include Best Practices issues, so that your reports highlight only actionable issues.
• Adopt accessibility standards in phases: Start by disabling complex rule sets, and then enable more strict configurations as your organization’s accessibility standards grow.

Related links

• How to configure rules in the rule engine
• Rule repository
• Accessibility score calculation