The Agency's Guide to Continuous Accessibility Monitoring

If you run a web agency, you probably have somewhere between 5 and 50 client sites in active management. Some you built. Some you inherited. All of them need to be accessible, and that obligation does not end at launch.

Accessibility regresses with every deployment. A developer adds an image without alt text. A new feature ships with a keyboard trap. A CMS update breaks heading hierarchy. Without monitoring, these regressions accumulate silently until a client gets a demand letter or a customer complaint.

This guide walks through setting up continuous accessibility monitoring for a client portfolio using Lumi.

Step 1: Add your client sites

From the Lumi dashboard, go to Sites and click Add site. Enter the client's URL. Lumi will automatically discover pages via sitemap and link crawling during the first scan.

For the Agency plan, you can add up to 25 sites. At roughly five pounds per site per month, this is significantly cheaper than running manual audits on each site quarterly.

Tip: Name each site with the client name, not just the domain. "Acme Corp" is more useful in your dashboard than "acme.co.uk" when you are scanning 20 sites.

Step 2: Run an initial scan

Trigger a scan on each site to establish a baseline. Lumi will crawl the site (up to your plan's page limit), run all five engines on each page, and produce a score and a prioritised issue list.

The first scan is the most important one. It tells you:

• The baseline score - where the site stands today
• Issue distribution - how many critical, serious, moderate, and minor issues exist
• Pages with the most problems - often checkout flows, forms, and pages with complex interactive components

Save or export this baseline. You will use it to demonstrate progress to clients over time.

Step 3: Configure scan schedules

Go to each site's settings and set a scan frequency:

• Daily - for sites with frequent deployments or active development
• Weekly - the default for most client sites in maintenance
• Monthly - for static sites that rarely change

Lumi's cron runs every 15 minutes and dispatches scans for sites that are due. You do not need to trigger scans manually after the initial setup.

Recommendation for agencies: Start every client on weekly scans. Move active-development clients to daily. Monthly is only appropriate for truly static sites with no CMS.

Step 4: Set up alerts

Go to Settings and configure notification preferences:

• Score regression alerts - get an email when any site's score drops by 5 or more points. This is the single most important alert for agency use. A score drop usually means a deployment introduced new accessibility issues.
• Scan complete notifications - optional, but useful during the initial remediation phase so you know when fresh results are available.
• Slack integration - if your team uses Slack, connect it via Integrations. Scan results and score changes post to a channel of your choice.
• Webhooks - for custom integrations, Lumi can POST scan results to any endpoint.

Step 5: Prioritise and assign fixes

After the baseline scan, open each site's scan results and sort issues by severity. The remediation priority should be:

1. Critical - fix immediately. These block users from accessing content or functionality entirely.
2. Serious - fix within the current sprint. These create significant barriers.
3. Moderate - schedule for the next sprint.
4. Minor - backlog.

Each issue in Lumi includes the WCAG criterion, the affected element with its CSS selector, the page URL, and a description of what is wrong. For Pro and Agency plans, AI-generated code fix suggestions show the specific before-and-after code change needed.

If you have the DevOps add-on, issues automatically create tickets that you can assign to team members, track through a status workflow, and sync with Jira.

Step 6: Integrate with your CI/CD pipeline

For clients where you manage the deployment pipeline, add Lumi to CI/CD so accessibility issues are caught before they reach production.

Generate an API key from Settings > API Keys, then add a scan step to your pipeline:

curl -X POST https://lumi.livana.io/api/v1/scans \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://staging.client-site.com", "waitForResult": true, "failBelow": 70}'

The failBelow parameter fails the pipeline if the score drops below your threshold. Start conservative (50 or 60) and raise the threshold as the site improves.

For GitHub Actions, see our CI/CD tutorial for a complete workflow file.

Step 7: Report to clients

Lumi generates PDF reports with your branding (set up under Settings > Report Branding with your logo, company name, and brand colour).

A typical monthly client report includes:

• Score trend over the past month (from the dashboard trend chart)
• Issues fixed since the last report
• New issues introduced (if any deployments caused regressions)
• Remaining critical and serious issues with remediation recommendations

The branded PDF export gives you a professional document you can attach to a client email or present in a review meeting. The report shows the client's site score, issue breakdown by severity, and the specific pages and elements affected.

Step 8: Monitor the trend

After the initial remediation push, the ongoing value of monitoring is catching regressions before they accumulate.

Check your Lumi dashboard weekly. The score trend chart shows whether each client site is improving, stable, or regressing. A sudden drop almost always correlates with a deployment.

For agencies, the most valuable metric is: how many client sites scored above 80 this month versus last month? Track this as your portfolio health indicator.

What monitoring does not replace

Automated monitoring catches the 30-40% of accessibility issues that tools can detect. For full WCAG compliance, clients in regulated sectors or with high litigation risk should also have periodic manual audits.

The monitoring and manual audit workflow is complementary: Lumi catches regressions continuously, and a human auditor catches the interaction, cognitive, and screen reader issues that no tool can detect. If your clients need a manual audit, the Livana team can help.

Start monitoring your client sites free at lumi.livana.io.