Rover508

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Thought processRover508 is Arca's Chrome extension for accessibility risk assessment. It is a practitioner-grade probe that gives product and engineering teams a procurement risk score and defensible business-unit metrics in under an hour. Rover508 compresses the first day of an accessibility engagement (the day a practitioner would otherwise charge several hours for) into a single browser session a product team can run itself, before a VPAT request, procurement review, or GRC evaluation puts the product on the clock. What makes Rover508 different from a generic accessibility scanner is that it does not start with the DOM. It starts with the product. Before running any checks, Rover508 maps the product to Section 508 scope with precision, identifying which flows, components, and states are actually in play for the assessment. That pre-mapping step is what practitioners do first when they open a new engagement, and it is the step every off-the-shelf scanner skips. Skipping it is why most automated tools return findings that procurement reviewers reject. Once the scope is set, Rover508 walks the product's core user flows: sign in, menu navigation, form submission, and the other paths a real user would take to accomplish real work. It runs each flow through three coordinated modalities. Functional testing evaluates whether the flow can be completed at all. Static testing evaluates the underlying markup, roles, names, and structure. Assistive technology testing evaluates how the flow behaves for a screen reader user, not just whether the code technically passes a rule. The output is a procurement risk score, plus the business-unit-level measurements a CRO, COO, or VP of Product actually needs to decide what to do next. Rover508 is also built to be retained past the initial assessment. Teams that have already remediated components can bring Rover508 back on a component-by-component basis to maintain accessibility as the product changes, catching regressions in the workflows that matter most before they become procurement risk again. Behind Rover508 sits Station508, Arca's service-as-a-software product for the end-to-end accessibility process, including calibration, full findings, VPAT production, and accessibility governance. Rover508 is the probe. Station508 is where the work gets done. Together they are how a product team moves from "we should look at accessibility" to "we can defend this in procurement" without hiring a consultancy.