Four states, two axes

A single accessibility score hides the difference between detected, suspected and not decidable by a machine at all. LiveAudit keeps those apart, on two axes that are never combined.

Outcome: how certain the statement is

State	Meaning
FAIL	Detected. The rule could prove it — the image has no alt text, the id exists twice.
REVIEW	Suspected heuristically. A person has to decide: “here” may be a fine link name in its sentence.
PASS	Passed. Kept in the report, not shown by default.
UNTESTED	Not decidable automatically. Produces a checklist item, not a verdict.

Severity: how much it weighs

Low to Critical, and deliberately independent of the outcome. A REVIEW on a navigation landmark and a FAIL on an unlabelled form field are not comparable by certainty alone.

There is no third “certainty” axis. A rule that can only guess returns REVIEW — not FAIL with low confidence. The moment certainty becomes a number, it becomes something to average.

The checklist

Some criteria no machine can decide: whether a video needs captions and has them, whether an alt text fits the image — or whether alt="" really marks it as decorative, whether bold text is secretly a heading, whether colour is the only cue, whether a time limit can be extended, whether errors are explained. For these, a page gets one UNTESTED item per criterion under manual/* as soon as it contains something the criterion applies to. It shows up on a flawless page too — that is the list of what still needs a person.

“Did not run” is not “passed”

Every rule leaves an execution record. A contrast check without rendering access reads like a passed check in most tools; here it is reported as a missing capability, and the report states what it did not inspect.

This is the part that matters most in practice. A tool that silently skips what it cannot measure produces a clean result for a page nobody checked.

No percentages

The states are never averaged, weighted or rolled into a score — not in the sidebar, not in the report model. UNTESTED is a visible category of its own rather than something filtered away, because that is precisely where the human work is.