What's New in Version 1.8

Increased choice with the introduction of WAVE, axe-core and equal-access to the platform

For the first time, you can now run scans, set up monitoring and store accessibility results for WAVE, axe-core and equal-access right from the platform. Adding these additional testing tools alongside ASLint gives you extra choice in which accessibility tools you use.

• Introducing support for WAVE – WebAIM's WAVE is one of the most commonly used accessibly tools in the industry and provides new ways to review results and prioritize issues.
• Introducing support for axe-core – Deque's axe-core is one of the most popular automated accessibility testing platforms in use today and is the foundation for standards like Google Lighthouse.
• Introducing support for equal-access testing – equal-access is developed and used by IBM for managing accessibility across a wide variety of web pages and web applications.
• Set a default testing tool – focus your attention on the testing tool you'd most prefer to work with by selecting a default testing tool. Once selected, results from your default tool will appear on your Portfolio, Dashboard and will be auto selected when viewing your scan results.
• Full platform support for all testing tools – all existing features you're used to using within the platform are now extended to each new testing tool. This includes support for features like authenticated site testing, site crawling, configuring different conformance levels, proactive monitoring, historical graphs using the accessibility health score, severity ratings for all rules and itemized issue findings.
• Automatic multi-tool scanning – evaluate your web page or web application with all four accessibility tools in one step; just run a scan of your website and results for each tool will be collected automatically.
• A new Evaluation Rules page – see which rules are being used by each tool with a variety of filter options on the new Evaluation Rules page.
• Rule configuration for better accessibility control – configure the rules used by each tool to adapt to your teams’ specific needs. You can do this by turning specific rules off or on from the Evaluation rules page.
• Rule configuration change history – create transparency around testing on your team with a comment audit trail updated every time a user turns on or off a rule.

Prioritize, fix and measure with a new Scan Results experience

In this release, we’ve redesigned our Scan Results page to help you prioritize work more efficiently, fix issues faster and measure progress more easily. This redesign also brings support for WAVE, axe-core and equal-access results so you can compare results across tools. 

• Quick switching between different accessibility tools – switch between testing results from WAVE, axe-core, equal-access and ASLint with just one click.
• Refined scan summary metrics – quickly view the accessibility score, issue breakdown by conformance level and issue breakdown by severity right from the scan results page.
• Automatic rule sorting for severity – failed rules are now automatically sorted by severity and the number of issues to help prioritize the most impactful errors for users.
• Sorting options for WCAG Success Criteria – you can now view, sort and prioritize rules by WCAG Success Criteria right from the scan results page.
• A new accessibility health trend – we've redesigned our scan analytics experience to show you the history of your monitoring scans over time.
• Excluded rule identification – continually review and optimize your scan results with insight into which rules are being excluded from each scan.
• Accessibility scores for individual pages – prioritize underperforming pages with the ability to see the accessibility score of each individual page in a multi-page scan.
• Report downloading and sharing for every accessibility tool – download a CSV or Excel report for any automated tool or share the report directly with another workspace member through email.
• Quicker access to rules and results – we've reduced the number of clicks needed to get to specific report findings so you can start reviewing issues even faster.

Start remediation faster with the redesigned Dashboard

The Dashboard is a centralized place for viewing your latest automated and manual results to quickly get started remediating. In this release we’re introducing quick filtering for manual results, a new accessibility health graph and an all-new automated scan history view.

• One-click filters for manual evaluations – quickly filter your manual results directly from the Dashboard with one-click filtering for issue status and WCAG success criteria.
• Sortable WCAG success criteria for manual evaluations – gain a better understanding of your manual results with new sorting options for WCAG success criteria on the Dashboard.
• Accessibility health trends and monitoring status – view the trend of your latest monitoring scores and your latest monitoring status right from the Dashboard.
• Easy comparisons for automated scans – Quickly compare different automated scans along several different KPI’s in the new Scan History view.
• Quick filtering by Scan Tag on the Dashboard – find the scans you're most interested in with quick filtering by Scan Tag in the Scan History view.
• Dashboard support for WAVE, axe-core and equal-access – The Dashboard can now display results from any available accessibility tool.

A streamlined Advanced Scan experience

We've made several improvements to our Advanced Scan experience to help make complex scans quicker than ever.

• Shorter scan set up – we've reduced scrolling and improved small-screen compatibility with a sidebar-free design and condensed controls for commonly used features.
• Integrated best practices – see the full accessibility picture with automatically included best practice rules for ASLint, axe-core and WAVE.
• Multi-tool support built in – we've made scanning across accessibility tools effortless by automatically scanning the pages you select with all testing libraries for every scan.

Other platform enhancements

• Accessibility Team now on the Portfolio – we've moved the Accessibility Team information from the Dashboard to the Portfolio.
• Changes to the status selection for manual issues – to prepare for future versions of the Manual Evaluations experience, we've made our manual issue status dropdown only editable by Accessibility Testers.
• A new Open status for manual issues – we're introducing a new Open status for manual issues to help you distinguish between opened issues and ones that have been progression tested.
• Status export for manual issues – easily track your manual issue status offline with status export. Now the status of each manual issues will be available in the exported issue CSV file.
• New property controls from the Card view – you can now see which Digital Properties have monitoring enabled and edit details of that Property from the Card view of the Portfolio.

Accessibility feature enhancements and bug fixes

• Improved document links – resolved an issue that sometimes caused links to documents from an email to result in an error.
• Support for new manual evaluation Rule ID's – this release bring support for a number of new manual evaluation Rule ID's including:

  • man-mob-cc-5

  • man-mob-tb-40

  • man-mob-orientation-1

  • man-mob-vo-3

  • man-mob-vo-11

  • man-mob-vo-13

  • man-mob-vo-19

  • man-mob-vo-20

  • man-mob-vo-21

  • man-mob-vo-22

  • man-mob-vo-23

  • man-mob-vo-24

  • man-mob-vo-25

  • man-mob-vo-26

  • man-mob-vo-27

  • man-mob-vo-28

  • man-mob-vo-29

  • man-mob-vo-30

  • man-mob-incorr-role-4

• Updated severities for some manual Rule ID's – updated the severity for man-sr-64 from High to Critical
• Updated WCAG success criteria for some manual Rule ID's – updated the WCAG success criteria for man-mob-tb-incorr-role to WCAG 4.1.2
• Removal of support for legacy manual evaluation Rule ID's – we've removed future support for the following manual Rule ID's:

  • man-mob-tb-24

  • man-mob-tb-25

  • man-mob-target-size

  • man-mob-app-head-not-tag-2

  • man-mob-focus-trap

  • man-mob-redundant link

  • man-mob-incorrect-heading-structure-2