Severity Mapping

name: severity-mapping description: Canonical severity level definitions and cross-domain mapping for web, document, and markdown accessibility audits. Includes score impact ranges, WCAG conformance alignment, and conversion rules for normalizing findings across audit types.

Severity Mapping

Canonical severity definitions shared across web, document, and markdown audit domains.

Canonical Severity Levels

Cross-Domain Equivalents

Score Impact Rules

Score impacts listed above are additive per finding. When the same issue recurs across many elements:

• First occurrence — full deduction
• Same issue type, same page/file — no additional deduction (already counted once per issue rule)
• Same issue type, different page/file — full deduction applies again to the new page/file score

Conversion Rules (Normalizing Cross-Domain Reports)

When generating a unified report that combines web, document, and markdown findings:

1. Map each finding to the canonical severity level using the table above.
2. Apply the score impact from the canonical level, not from the domain-specific tool's internal scoring.
3. For aggregated scores (portfolio or project level), compute each page/file score independently, then average.
4. Do not double-count a finding that appears in both an axe-core scan and a Playwright behavioral scan -- deduplicate by rule ID and element location.

Confidence Modifier (Web Domain)

For web audits, confidence level modifies the base deduction:

Document and markdown audits do not use confidence multipliers -- they use the base score impact only.