Sections can be used to break down a website into smaller chunks. Often these smaller sections are used to allow different departments to manage their own areas of the website, without their tasks being drowned out by the overall results for the main website. Sections can also be used to compare score results across different areas of the website.

When you create a section within your website, you'll need to create a rule to identify the pages included within the section. Often this rule is based on a page's URL. As an example, a university may create a "Courses" section that only includes content whose URL begins with "https://www.fake-university.com/courses". While this rule will apply to your HTML pages, PDF documents are handled a bit differently.

By default, a section's PDF inventory will include documents that may not meet the rules that define the section. This is because many websites organize their documents into a centralized location, often a "documents" or "resources" folder at the root of the website. A section will include all PDFs that are linked to from the section's pages. A section's PDFs must still follow the What we test rules defined by the overall website.

There is a way to apply any of a section's What we test rules to a PDF. You can get to the What we test screen by navigating to your website section and selecting the Settings link in the top-right corner. From there, you will find the link to the What we test screen.

As described above, the Allowed rules and Denied rules do not apply to documents by default. However, clicking on a rule will bring up a screen that lets you edit the rule. On this screen, there will be a checkbox you can select to force the rule to apply to documents as well as HTML content. This same checkbox is available whenever you create rules for a section.