Skip to main content
Tick PowerMapper
 Try it now

Rule settings SortSite Desktop Manual

Rules detect issues to report and are grouped into sets of guidelines (e.g. WCAG 2.1, ARIA).

Choosing rules

Before scanning a site you can choose the rules and sets of guidelines to run.

  1. Click the Scan Options button on the sidebar (or Scan Options in the Check menu)
  2. Enable or disable the groups of rules and guidelines you want to run
  3. Click OK then check your site

Disabling specific rules

Sometimes a rule is not appropriate for your site or line of business. Once you’ve checked a site you can choose which rules you want to ignore:

  1. Go to report page containing the issue you want to ignore
  2. Click the button next to the issue labelled by N pages (where N is a number)
  3. Choose Ignore Always in the popup menu to disable the rule for all sites

Once disabled the rule is grayed out in scan reports, and won’t appear in exported reports. The rule can be enabled again by selecting Enabled in the popup menu.

Spell checking

You can check for spelling errors in a number of languages:

  1. Click the Scan Options button on the sidebar (or Scan Options in the Check menu)
  2. Go to the Errors tab and choose the default Spelling Check language
  3. Click OK then check your site

The default spell check language is used on pages that do not have an html lang or xml:lang attribute. It is also used on pages marked as lang='en' to specify the dialect of English in use (US spellings or UK spellings). Setting the spell check language to “No” disables spell checking.

For example:

  • <html lang="en-US"> US spell check is performed unless spell check language is “No”.
  • <html lang="en-GB"> UK spell check is performed unless spell check language is “No”.
  • <html lang="fr"> French spell check is performed.
  • <html lang="en"> If spell check language is one of the English dialects, spelling is checked against that dialect.
  • <html> Spell check uses the spell check language setting.

Spelling mistakes are shown in the site report, with misspelled words underlined. Click on the words to display spelling options for that word:

  • Add to Dictionary adds the word to the custom dictionary (shared by all languages)
  • Remove from Dictionary removes the word to the custom dictionary
  • Default Language changes the default spell check language (see above)

Custom text search

You can scan for text or code that should appear on every HTML page (e.g. a disclaimer, or analytics tags), as well as text that must not appear on any pages (e.g. an error message or competitor’s trademark).

  1. Click the Scan Options button on the sidebar (or Scan Options in the Check menu)
  2. Go to the Errors tab
  3. Enter search strings in the Required Text and Forbidden Text boxes (one search string per line).
  4. Click OK then check your site

Optimizing search keywords

You can check for optimization of specific keywords:

  1. Click the Scan Options button on the sidebar (or Scan Options in the Check menu)
  2. Go to the Search tab
  3. Tick the Best practice rules checkbox
  4. Enter your keywords in the Check for keywords box
  5. Click OK then check your site

Controlling how many issues are reported

Many issues are often duplicated across every page in a site. The Reports tab of the Scan Options window lets you set limits for your reports:

  • Maximum pages shown for each issue sets the maximum number of pages with this issue that are listed in the report. If the number of issues found is over this limit, the report shows how many other pages also have this issue. This reduces noise from issues in page templates that affect every page of a site.
  • Maximum line numbers shown for each issue is the number of lines per page an issue is reported on. This reduces noise from issues like HTML attributes without quotes that can occur on every line of HTML code. So if you have this set at 4 and a page has 5 missing quotes, only the first 4 are reported. If the issue was found on more links a … appears next to the last line number in the report.

Sharing rule settings

To share rule settings with a co-worker:

  1. On your computer click Export Settings from the File menu
  2. Choose a file name then click Save
  3. Copy the saved settings file to your co-workers computer
  4. On your co-workers computer click Import Settings from the File menu
  5. Select the saved settings file

Reporting broken rules

If a rule doesn’t work the way you expect we want to hear about it. If you think a rule is reporting an issue when it shouldn’t:

  1. Go to report page containing the issue you want to report
  2. Click the button next to the issue labelled by N pages (where N is a number)
  3. Choose Report Broken Rule to show a mail window containing rule details
  4. Add as much additional detail as you can - this will help us fix the rule in a future version