Exclusions & Suppressions

Vesper Audit gives you two tools for focusing your reports on what matters: exclusions remove pages from the crawl entirely, and suppressions hide specific violations from the output after the scan runs. Together they help you produce clean, actionable reports without noise from pages or issues you have intentionally decided not to address.

Exclusions

Exclusions prevent specific URLs or URL patterns from being crawled. Use exclusions when:

Certain sections of the site are out of scope for the current audit (e.g., a legacy CMS section being retired).
Login-protected pages cannot be crawled without authentication.
Auto-generated pages (search results, tag archives, paginated indexes) would inflate page counts without adding useful findings.
Third-party content (help widgets, embedded tools) generates consistent false positives.

Adding exclusions

Go to Settings > Exclusions.
Enter a URL pattern in the exclusion field. You can use:

Exact URL - https://example.com/admin/ - excludes only that exact page.
Prefix match - https://example.com/blog/ - excludes any URL that begins with this string, including all pages under /blog/.
String contains - ?page= - excludes any URL that contains this substring, useful for excluding paginated URLs.

Click Add to save the pattern.

Exclusions take effect before the crawl starts. Excluded pages are never fetched or analyzed, which can also speed up large-site scans significantly.

Suppressions

Suppressions hide specific violation types from the output. Use suppressions when:

A violation is a confirmed false positive from the axe-core ruleset.
A violation is a known issue that has been accepted as a documented risk (e.g., a third-party widget with a known issue that the vendor has not fixed).
A violation falls outside the scope of the current audit engagement.

Suppressions are not a substitute for fixing issues. Use them to keep reports focused, but document the reason for each suppression. Vesper Audit includes vendor disclaimer callouts in reports for suppressions related to third-party content.

Adding suppressions

Go to Settings > Suppressions.
Enter the rule ID for the violation to suppress. Rule IDs from axe-core appear in the report (e.g., color-contrast, image-alt, link-name). Vesper's built-in custom checks also have suppressible rule IDs: vesper-ambiguous-link and vesper-duplicate-link-text.
Optionally, enter a note explaining the reason for the suppression.
Click Add to save.

Suppression scope

Suppressions can be scoped in two ways:

Global suppression - the rule is suppressed across all pages of the audit.
Page-specific suppression - the rule is suppressed only on a specific URL. Useful when a violation is acceptable on one page but should be reported on others.

Reviewing active exclusions and suppressions

All active exclusions and suppressions are listed in Settings > Exclusions and Settings > Suppressions respectively. They are also recorded in the audit summary file so your output is self-documenting.

Per-client configurations

Exclusions and suppressions are saved as part of your exported settings. The recommended approach for managing clients is to export a settings file per client that includes their specific exclusions and suppressions. See Settings Import & Export for details.