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How do I author a flow?

A Flow is a sequence of steps AccessLint walks through on your site, auditing each page for accessibility issues. You describe each step in plain language, no CSS selectors, and AccessLint navigates by the page’s accessibility tree.

You’ll need a verified domain first.

Create the flow

1. Open Flows in your dashboard and click New flow.
2. Give it a name (e.g. “Checkout journey”), pick the domain it runs against, and choose a cadence: Daily or Weekly.
3. Click Create flow. This opens the editor, where you author the steps.

There are two ways to author the steps. You can use either, or start with a description and refine by hand. (There’s also a third path that skips the blank page entirely: generate draft flows from your repo.)

Option 1: Describe the flow in prose

Under Describe the flow, write the journey in plain language, for example:

Log in with my email and password, go to settings, and change my display name.

Click Generate steps and AccessLint drafts the steps into the editor below for you to review and edit. If your description mentions a value that should be a secret (like a password), AccessLint may reference it as a {variable} and prompt you to define it in the Variables section. See Variables below.

Option 2: Build steps by hand

In the Steps section, click Add step for each step. A step has:

• A type: one of:
  • Go to: navigate to a URL (relative like /settings, or absolute https://…)
  • Click: activate a link, button, or control
  • Fill: type into a field
  • Select: choose an option
  • Press key: press a key such as Enter
  • Wait for: wait until something appears
• An instruction in plain language, e.g. Click the “Sign in” button or Fill the “Email” field. Describe the target the way a person would: no selectors.
• A value, for Fill, Select, and Press key steps: the text to type, the option to choose, or the key to press. Values can reference a {variable}.

Use the move and remove controls to reorder or delete steps. A flow can have up to 25 steps. Click Save flow when you’re done.

Variables (for logins and secrets)

Login steps need credentials, and you shouldn’t paste those into a step instruction. Instead, define them as variables:

1. In the Variables section, enter a name (e.g. password) and its value.
2. Click Add variable.
3. Reference it in a Fill step’s value as {password}.

Variable values are stored encrypted, never shown again, and never sent to the language model that drafts steps from prose. To rotate a secret, remove the variable and add it again with the new value.

Run a dry run and approve it

A flow doesn’t start monitoring until you approve a dry run: this is the trust gate.

1. In the Dry run section, click Run a dry run. AccessLint resolves every step and audits each page it reaches.
2. Review the results. See How do I read a flow run’s results? for what the step statuses mean. If the flow behaved as expected, approve it. A dry run with a failed step can’t be approved; fix the step and run another.

Approving the dry run does two things: it seeds the baseline from everything the run found (so those become “known violations” that won’t re-alert), and it starts the schedule. From then on, each scheduled run alerts only on new violations compared to that baseline.

Besides the schedule, you can start a run yourself any time with Run now on the flow’s page (up to 10 manual runs per flow per day), or trigger runs from your deploys.

Editing a flow later

Editing the steps invalidates the approved run, so scheduling pauses and the flow shows Needs dry run. Run and approve a fresh dry run to resume. Changing only the name or cadence does not pause scheduling.

Pausing a flow

Pause on the flow’s page stops scheduling without losing anything: the steps and baseline are kept. Resume re-enters the schedule; no new dry run is needed. (AccessLint also pauses a flow itself when its runs can’t sign in, so it doesn’t fail repeatedly against a login wall.)

Managing known violations

On a flow’s page, the Known violations list is the baseline each run is compared against. Dismiss a violation to acknowledge it: dismissed violations stay in the baseline and never re-alert. Only regressions introduced after your last approval will trigger a new alert. See How do I manage known violations? for triaging, auditing, and re-enabling dismissals.