Webscan Documentation

Lesson 19 · Reports & branding

Phase 5 · Delivery & governance — Lesson 19 of 21 · All lessons

Objective: understand what a report is, generate the right type for your audience, export it, and brand it as your own — so you can deliver your accessibility work, not just do it.

Before you start: a project with some scans and issues (Lessons 4 and 7).

Why reports matter

All the work so far lives inside webscan. But your manager, your client, or an auditor needs something they can read, save, and file. That's a report.

Report — a generated, point-in-time document summarising the accessibility state of a project, in a format you can share and keep. It's the deliverable: the thing that turns your scanning and fixing into evidence someone else can act on.

Two kinds of export

Webscan gives you reports at two levels:

• Per-scan export (you met this in Lesson 4) — a quick report of a single scan, exported straight from the scan page as HTML, PDF, or DOCX. Good for a fast "here's what this scan found."
• Project reports — a considered, generated report for a whole project, saved and versioned on the project's Reports page. This is the proper deliverable, and the focus of this lesson.

Choose the right report type

When you Generate report on the Reports page, you pick a report type — each written for a different audience:

For the all issues report you also choose an issue scope: All issues, Open and active issues, or Verified and closed issues — so you can show "everything," "what's left," or "what we've fixed."

Give the report a title, generate it, and it's saved to the project.

Export and deliver

Open a saved report and use Download report to get it as:

• Accessible HTML — a web page (and, fittingly, an accessible one),
• PDF — for formal sharing and archiving,
• DOCX — a Word document you or a client can edit.

Immutable snapshots: why a report doesn't change

A report captures the state at the moment you generated it — and then it's frozen. Webscan stores each report as an immutable snapshot (it can't be edited after the fact) with an integrity hash (a fingerprint that proves the content hasn't been altered).

Why this matters: a report is evidence. If someone could quietly change a past report, it would be worthless in an audit or a dispute. Immutability means "this is exactly what we reported on that date," and the integrity check would flag any tampering (you'd see a snapshot integrity check failed warning). If the situation changes, you generate a new report rather than altering the old one.

Branding: make reports yours

By default a report is webscan-branded. If you're delivering to clients (or just want your own identity on it), set up report branding for your organisation. On the organisation's report branding page you can set:

• Report brand name — the name shown on reports (your company, or a client's),
• Report contact — the contact details to display,
• Logo URL — a link to your logo image.

Once set, generated reports carry your branding instead of webscan's — so an agency can hand a client a report that looks like the agency's (or the client's) own.

Tips & pitfalls

• Match the report type to the reader. Don't send a manager the technical audit — send the management summary; save the technical one for the developers.
• Generate a fresh report for each milestone rather than trying to reuse an old one — immutability is a feature, not an obstacle.
• Set branding once, up front, especially for client work, so every report goes out looking right.
• Keep the PDFs. They're your dated, tamper-evident record of where things stood.

Recap

• A report is a shareable, point-in-time deliverable; export a single scan quickly, or generate a project report.
• Three types — Technical, Management, All issues (with a scope filter) — one per audience.
• Reports are immutable snapshots with an integrity hash — trustworthy evidence; regenerate rather than edit.
• Branding puts your (or a client's) name, contact, and logo on every report.

Try it yourself

Generate a Management accessibility summary and a Technical accessibility audit for your project, and download each as PDF. Then set your organisation's report branding and regenerate one — confirm your brand name now appears on it.

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