Getting started

From install to your first approved fix in about ten minutes. Nothing in this guide requires configuration; the app starts working the moment it is installed.

1. Install, then make coffee

   The first storefront scan and catalog audit start automatically on install. The Overview shows a setup guide that ticks itself as the work completes, usually within two minutes. You do not need to press anything.

2. Read the Overview

   The headline number is distinct conformance failures: the number of decisions you have to make, not the number of elements affected. Next to it: templates covered, catalog images missing alt text, and what a scan can and cannot tell you. That last part stays on screen permanently, because it is the truth.

3. Review your first alt text draft

   Open the Alt text page. Each image with no alt text gets a drafted description in an editable box. Read it, fix any word you dislike, and approve, or skip the image entirely. Approved drafts are published to your product data when you press publish, and only then.

4. Work through the Issues page

   Findings are grouped by rule, each with its WCAG criterion, severity, exact locations, and what to do. Colour-contrast findings include a passing shade of your own colour. Where only you can act, the app says so and takes you to the right screen instead of pretending it fixed something.

5. Turn on the focus styles

   In your theme editor, under App embeds, enable Mendvale focus styles: a visible keyboard focus outline in pure CSS that defers to your theme where it has its own. The next scan confirms it is live on your storefront by looking, and the setup guide ticks itself only then.

6. Put a statement on record (paid)

   Once the scan and audit have both completed, the Statement page can generate an accessibility statement from your actual evidence. It refuses to overclaim, names what has been tested and what remains, and is kept in a dated archive that never rewrites history.