WARD Live privacy policy
WARD Live is a research tool from the University of Galway that checks a web page against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 and 2.2 and compares the result with a published census of civil society websites. It is free, open source, and carries no advertising or analytics.
What the extension does with your data
When you click "Audit this page", the extension reads the web address of the tab you are looking at and sends that address to the WARD Live server. The server then fetches the page itself, in the same way a browser would, and returns the audit result to the extension. Nothing else from the page or from your browser is sent: not its content, not your cookies, not your browsing history, and not anything you have typed.
When you click "Outline on page", the extension adds temporary markings to the page you are viewing so that you can see where the violations are. These markings exist only in your browser, are removed when you click "Clear" or reload the page, and are never transmitted anywhere.
The extension stores one setting in your browser's extension storage: the country you chose for the comparison, if you changed it from automatic detection. They may be synchronised across your browser profile by the browser itself. They are not sent to us.
What the server keeps
The server holds audit results in memory while it is running so that the full report and the task list can be opened. It keeps up to the last five hundred reports and discards older ones; everything is cleared when the server stops. A server you run yourself keeps data only on your own machine. If a contributor study is enabled on a server, the task identifiers, minutes spent and outcomes that contributors enter on the study page are written to a file on that server; no names are required and no personal details are collected.
The census comparison uses only the published, organisation-level records of the open dataset (Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23529469). It contains no personal information.
What we do not do
- We do not collect names, email addresses, accounts or any identifier for the person using the extension.
- We do not track which pages you visit. The extension does nothing until you click its button.
- We do not use analytics, advertising or third-party services of any kind.
- We do not sell, share or transfer any data to anyone.
Permissions the extension asks for
- activeTab and tabs: to read the address of the page you are on when you click the button.
- scripting: to draw the outlines on the page when you ask for them.
- storage: to remember your server address and country choice.
Websites that are audited
The server fetches one publicly served page per request, identifies itself with an ordinary browser user agent, and stores nothing about the page beyond the audit result described above. Audits are shown to the person who requested them and are not published.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted at this address with a new date.
Contact and help
Muhammad Sohaib Ayub, Institute for Data and AI Research, University of Galway, Ireland. Email muhammadsohaib.ayub@universityofgalway.ie. Code and data: github.com/sohaibayub/ward-live.