AccessPreflightAPI documentation
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Accessibility evidence your delivery pipeline can act on

AccessPreflight runs practical accessibility preflight checks for public URLs, supplied HTML, PDF, and DOCX files. Use the API to catch machine-detectable failures, organize specialist review, compare a release with a baseline, and export evidence for the people who must fix or approve the work.

AccessPreflight is a preflight system, not a certification service. A clean automated result does not prove legal or standards compliance. Manual and specialist review remain part of an accessible release.

What the API solves

Accessibility work is often split between a scanner, spreadsheets, issue trackers, and manual audit notes. The API gives each submitted asset one durable scan record and a consistent result model:

  1. Submit a URL, raw HTML, an HTML bundle, a PDF, or a DOCX file.
  2. Pin the accessibility profiles and release rules that apply.
  3. Observe the asynchronous scan lifecycle.
  4. Retrieve normalized findings, coverage, and manual-review work.
  5. Export JSON, accessible HTML, Excel, ACR evidence, or a signed evidence manifest.
  6. Compare compatible scans to find new, recurring, and resolved fingerprints.

Four values that must stay separate

Do not reduce a scan to one green or red badge. The response deliberately separates:

Field Question it answers Example
status Did the platform finish the job? completed, fetch_failed
result What did the accessibility checks observe? detected_failures
quality_gate.status Did your configured release rule pass? failed, indeterminate
risk_score What is the relative technical remediation priority? 64

A completed scan can require review. A scan with detected failures can still pass a permissive release rule. An incomplete scan should not be treated as a pass.

Coverage is part of the result

Every rule is classified as deterministic, partial, heuristic, or manual. Coverage explains what actually ran and what still needs a human. Heuristics and manual checks never become deterministic passes.

When a page blocks resources, a file is only partly analyzable, or a required engine does not execute, the result records reduced coverage rather than inventing accessibility failures.

API conventions

  • Base URL: https://api.accesspreflight.com
  • Version prefix: /v1
  • Authentication: Authorization: Bearer <API_KEY>
  • Timestamps: UTC RFC 3339
  • Create operations: require a unique Idempotency-Key
  • Errors: stable error.code plus an X-Request-ID
  • Collections: { "data": [...], "next_cursor": "..." }
  • Rate and temporary-capacity responses: 429 with Retry-After

API keys are scoped to one project, environment, and permission set. Cross-organization resources intentionally look like 404 Not Found.

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