Total Validator Check Accessibility, HTML, CSS, Broken Links & Spelling

Example form

Here is a simple form you can use to practice on:

Start the Total Validator Pro application and create a new workspace using File > New, then Save this. Enter a Start page of https://www.totalvalidator.com/help/examples.html, and ensure the Stop after options are all blank in Include, so that all pages are tested. To view all the pages that are tested go to the Results options and set the Show on success option.

If you now Validate, it will just test this page, so we need to configure it to log in ...

Configure the Forms options

The first step is always to view the source of the page and look for the <form> tag. For most browsers right click and choose the appropriate View source option.

On our page we see: <form method="post" action="/validator/ExampleForm">, so set the Action URL on the Forms page to /validator/ExampleForm. This must be exactly what appears in the action attribute, anything else and it will not work.

Next, we need to add Parameters for all the fields that the user needs to complete. Here, we just have the User ID and Password fields, but in practice you may also have checkboxes or other input fields that need to be completed for the form to work. Note that you do not have to add parameters for any hidden fields or the submit button as these will be automatically read and sent by Total Validator.

Always use the value of the name attribute and not the id attribute, so on the Forms page enter Parameters for user with a value of The User ID, and pwd with a value of The Password.

If you now Validate, it will log into the form and test the start page, the logged-in page, and the style sheet. But it is not testing all of the restricted pages, so we need to investigate further ...

Manually log into the form

You should always manually log into the form and look at the page that appears, as there are some important things to learn.

First, check the URL of the page displayed. If the URL refers to a completely different website to the form then by default Total Validator will ignore any links on it. If you're using SAML authentication then please see our dedicated SAML topic for further help. If not, then you'll have to login manually and use a browser extension to start testing.

In our case the website is the same, but it is still not testing other pages such as SubPage1.html or SubPage2.html, so we need to investigate further ...

Exclude any links that log you out

Use your browser's View Source option to inspect the source of the page, and you'll see a Sign Off link. On your own site it may be Sign Out or Log Off or something similar.

Inspecting this link we see: <a href="LogOff">Sign Off</a>. When Total Validator tests this link it will be immediately logged off, so that's why it can't test SubPage1.html or SubPage2.html, because it's being logged off before it gets to them.

To fix this, on the Include page we need to add an Exclude path to ignore the Sign Off link by entering the full path of the sign off link relative to the website root: /validator/LogOff.

If you run another test, all five resources should now be tested.