After your scan: how to share what you learned

You scanned a site. You read the report. You used the site. Now you know things about it that no scan could tell you.

The next person who lands on that site has the same questions you had. They do not have to start from scratch if you have left a review.

This is a guide to how reviews work on LumiLens, what makes a useful review, and what happens when you leave one.

What a review is

A LumiLens review is a short, written account of your experience using a website. It includes:

• -A star rating from 1 to 5
• -A few sentences of body text (10 to 2,000 characters)
• -Your assistive technology setup (pulled from your account preferences, so you don't have to repeat it)
• -Your experience level (beginner, intermediate, advanced) with that technology

You can leave one review per site. You can edit it later if your experience changes.

What a review isn't

Reviews are not:

• -A bug report. If something specific is broken, the report you generated already documents it. Share the report URL with the site's team.
• -A complaint platform. We moderate. Reviews that are personal attacks, unsubstantiated claims, or off-topic get hidden.
• -Anonymous. Reviews show the reviewer's name and AT setup. We think that is part of what makes them trustworthy.

What makes a review useful

The most useful reviews answer questions the scan couldn't. A few examples of the kind of thing that helps:

"The search worked fine with NVDA, but the checkout flow had a focus trap on the date picker. I had to refresh and use a different browser." This is gold. It is specific, it identifies the AT, it tells the next person exactly where to expect a problem.

"Mostly accessible with VoiceOver, but the cookie banner blocks the page until you dismiss it and the dismiss button is not keyboard-focusable. Tab past it before it fully loads if you can." Same. Specific, AT-aware, includes a workaround.

"I use a keyboard and the main nav is fine, but the secondary nav inside the user dashboard does not have focus indicators." Useful. Tells the next user where the friction is.

Reviews that are less useful:

• -"Great site" or "Terrible" with no specifics
• -General WCAG complaints without describing your experience ("This site fails 2.4.7")
• -Reviews about the company's customer service or product quality, rather than the site's accessibility

What happens after you submit

A review goes live immediately. We do not gate publication. We do moderate, which means:

• -We can hide a review if it breaks the guidelines
• -The site owner can ask us to review a specific claim if they believe it is factually wrong
• -Other users can flag reviews they think are inappropriate
• -Other users can mark your review as helpful, which raises it in the listing

Reviews you have written show up on your profile and on the site's profile page. They are permanent unless you delete them.

The reviewer's AT badge

Every review shows the reviewer's assistive technology setup. A review by an NVDA user has an "NVDA" badge. A review by someone using voice control has a "Voice control" badge. This is the thing that makes LumiLens reviews different from TripAdvisor or Trustpilot.

A keyboard user reading a site's reviews can filter to other keyboard users and learn what to expect with their specific setup. A JAWS user can find JAWS users. We can't tell every user what to expect, but the community can.

Why we ask for reviews

We have said this elsewhere but it bears repeating. Automated tools catch around 30 to 40 percent of real accessibility barriers. The other 60 to 70 percent is what you experience. The only way for LumiLens to know about that 60 to 70 percent is for the people who use the sites to write it down.

Every review makes the next person's decision easier. Every review makes the directory more useful. Every review is a small contribution to a thing that did not exist before.

If you have used a site recently and you have something to say, take two minutes. Find the site in the directory, click "Leave a review", say what you learned.

The next person will thank you.