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3.5 Preliminary Report

After both locations and test sets are defined and the corresponding checkpoints are marked as done, Preliminary Report starts to be created. It is accessible under the [Report] menu item and consists of a list of errors found in the tested pages.

The purpose of making Preliminary Report is to give webmasters chance to fix the most important accessibility errors in their pages before human testers start their work. It makes no sense to start thorough testing before trivial easily detected errors are fixed.

The work on preliminary report proceeds in the page referenced by [Tests&Issues] menu item. The main job here is to classify issues reported by WAchecker. Each issue can have one of the following classification statuses as selected in Status: form field:

unhandled
This is the initial issue state. You must change state of all the reported issues to another state before Review Issues checkpoint can be marked as done.
ok
Indicates the issue is not an accessibility error and can be completely ignored.
error
Indicates the issue is an accessibility error. Only issues marked as errors appear in the report.
n/a
Used when the issue is actually not an issue in the page context. Typically used for conditional issues such as If the object is dynamic, ... when they don't apply (e.g. the object is not dynamic).
clone
Issue is classified and commented completely the same way as the issue referenced in Clone of issue#: field.

To ease the tedious issue classification work, WAassistant performs some form of automated issue cloning and grouping based on the issue parameters. If some issue is cloned while it shouldn't be, just fix it in the editing form—any change in issue data breaks its clone status.

In addition to changing issue states, you can add further explanations to Report: fields of issues. You can also add explanations to a whole test in Report: field of the test editing form. Contents of both issue and test Report: fields are present in the assembled report.

After all issues are classified, mark the Review Issues checkpoint as done. Proceed with Review Preliminary Report and once you are sure the Preliminary Report is accurate and finished, publish it with marking Publish Preliminary Report as done.

Webmasters are expected to fix the errors published in Preliminary Report before the testing work continues. Once the fixes are done, a Supervisor notifies WAassistant about it by marking the Resolve Issues checkpoint as done. Then WAassistant reruns all the automated test and generates completely new automatically generated issues.