Terms of service

Curbline scans web pages for accessibility problems and reports what it finds. These terms cover what that service is, and — just as importantly — what it is not.

What Curbline is not

This section is a limitation on what we provide, not a disclaimer attached to it. It describes the service accurately, and nothing elsewhere on this site, in our emails, or in any report we generate should be read as promising otherwise.

• •Curbline does not certify compliance with WCAG, the ADA, the European Accessibility Act, or any other standard or law. No report, score, or PDF we produce is a certificate, an audit, or a statement of conformance.
• •Curbline does not guarantee any outcome. A high score is not a statement that a site is accessible. A score of 100 means only that the rules which could be applied to that page passed.
• •Curbline does not protect you from litigation or from regulatory action, and does not reduce your legal obligations. Using it is not a defence and we make no claim that it is.
• •Curbline does not fix your site. We suggest changes. Deciding whether a change is right, and making it, is yours.

What automated testing can actually reach

Automated accessibility testing finds a minority of accessibility problems. In an analysis by Deque Systems of approximately 300,000 accessibility issues found across roughly 13,000 pages, automated testing accounted for about 57% of the issues identified.

That figure is commonly misread, so to be precise: it describes the share of issues found that a tool surfaced. It is not a statement that 57% of WCAG success criteria can be tested automatically, and it is not a claim that any given page has been 57% checked. Whether a rule applies at all depends on what is on the page; our reports state how many rules actually applied to each page for exactly that reason.

Criteria that require human judgement — whether captions are accurate, whether alternative text is meaningful, whether an error message actually helps — cannot be assessed by any tool, ours included. Every report we produce lists which criteria were evaluated and which require manual review.

The source is Deque Study Shows Its Automated Testing Identifies 57 Percent of Digital Accessibility Issues, Deque Systems, 10 March 2021, drawn from anonymised data across more than 2,000 audits.

One thing to know about that figure, which we would rather say than have you discover: Deque publish axe-core, Curbline runs axe-core, and the study is Deque measuring their own tool. It remains the largest published analysis of its kind and we have not found a better one, but it is a vendor measuring themselves, the sample is their own audit work, and it was published in 2021. Read it as the best available estimate rather than an independent finding.

Scanning sites, including ones you do not own

Our scanner requests a page the way a browser does, runs tests against it, and stores the results — including fragments of the page’s HTML. We do not verify who owns a URL before scanning it.

By submitting a URL you confirm that you have the right to request a scan of that page, and that doing so does not breach any agreement, terms of use, or law applying to it. That responsibility is yours. If you do not have that right, do not submit the URL.

You must not use Curbline to:

• •Scan pages behind a login, paywall, or any access control you are not entitled to use.
• •Generate load against a site you do not operate, or attempt to use scans as a means of disruption.
• •Circumvent the rate limits, including by automating requests across many addresses.

We may refuse or remove any scan, and suspend accounts that use the service this way.

Plans and billing

• •Store — $79/mo, covering 1 monitored site with weekly automated re-scans.
• •Agency — $249/mo, covering up to 15 sites and white-label reports.

Subscriptions bought on this website are billed monthly in advance through Stripe and renew automatically until cancelled. Prices are exclusive of tax, and tax is not currently calculated or added at checkout — the amount shown is the amount charged. If you subscribed through the Shopify App Store, see the separate section below: Stripe is not involved and the cancellation terms differ.

You can cancel at any time from the billing portal, without contacting us. Cancelling stops future billing and takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for — access continues until then. Again, Shopify subscriptions work differently; see below.

If a payment fails, we continue your access while the card is retried and tell you in the dashboard. If every retry fails, the subscription ends and the plan drops to free. Nothing is deleted when that happens: your sites and scan history remain for the periods set out in the privacy policy, currently 365 days from each scan.

Reducing from Agency to Store leaves more sites on your account than the plan covers. We pause all of them rather than choosing which to keep, and ask you to pick. No site and no history is deleted by a downgrade.

If you subscribed through the Shopify App Store

Shopify merchants are billed by Shopify, not by us. The charge appears on your Shopify invoice alongside your other app subscriptions, it is approved on Shopify’s own confirmation screen, and we never receive your card details by any route. Stripe plays no part in it.

Because Shopify is the biller, Shopify’s terms govern the payment itself — including how charges are presented, retried and refunded. These terms still govern what the service is and what it does not promise, which is the substance of everything above.

Changing plan works from the Plans page inside the app. Moving between Store and Agency replaces the existing charge immediately. Choosing Free cancels the subscription immediately and credits the unused part of the period you have already paid for, rather than running to the end of the period — that is the opposite of the website behaviour described above, and is worth knowing before you click it. You can also cancel from your Shopify admin.

Nothing is deleted when a subscription ends. Your scan history remains and ages out on the ordinary schedule in the privacy policy. Uninstalling the app is a separate action with its own timetable, also set out there.

Availability and changes

We do not promise uninterrupted service. Scans depend on the site being scanned being reachable, and a scan can fail for reasons entirely outside our control — a site that is down, refuses our request, or takes too long to load. A failed scan does not count against your limits.

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you we will say so by email before it takes effect, rather than quietly updating this page.

Contact

Email hello@curbline.app.