Welcome to Access Engine updates! Access Engine is Level Access's automated testing engine built on more than 20 years of experience from leading accessibility experts. Access Engine is used with or available across our suite of products.
We've published our most recent set of improvements. These changes will reduce the number of false positives in scan results and improve testing accuracy. If you have any questions, reach out to your Advisor Services team.
On this page:
Version 2.30
What’s new?
- All five of the newly added rules relate to elements not intentionally hidden in the DOM that are available to assistive technologies.
- These new rules test things like the aria-owns, aria-controls, aria-labelledby, aria-activedescendant attributes for invalid or duplicate IDs.
- One additional rule checks for duplicate IDs in header attributes.
- The changes to the five updated rules include updated descriptions, updates of some rules from automatic to guided automatic, and improved logic on some existing tests for improved accuracy.
What’s changed?
We have updated Access Engine to version 2.30 across the platform and related services.
- Level Access Platform
- Access Continuum (CONT)
- Continuum Scripting Framework (CSF)
Who is impacted?
- All current tenants.
- All subscription packages.
- All digital assets configured with Access Engine.
How will this impact you?
Digital assets configured with Access Engine may see a slight improvement in accessibility scores due to the latest rule enhancements and updates included in this release.
Version 2.29
What’s changed?
Starting March 30th, 2026, Access Engine will include:
- 19 new rules to expand automated testing coverage.
- Updates to 18 existing rules to improve accuracy and reduce false positives.
The new and updated rules primarily strengthen validation in the following areas:
- Autocomplete attribute validation, including incorrect token order and invalid token values.
- ARIA role and state enforcement, such as ensuring required attributes are present for applicable roles and validating logic.
- ARIA attribute usage and restrictions, including detection of disallowed attributes and invalid attribute combinations.
- Accessible name and reference validation, including mismatches between visible text and accessible names, duplicate ID references in ARIA relationships, and heading hierarchy issues within modal dialogs.
These enhancements improve standards alignment and increase the reliability and precision of automated findings.
How will this impact you?
Automated scans run on or after March 30th may show changes in issue counts and scan scores. This means you may see different results than expected in upcoming scans or monitoring results. Specifically, you may see one of three outcomes:
- Some scans may report more issues and lower scores due to newly identified issues from the added rules.
- Many scans may report fewer issues and higher scores thanks to reduced false positives from updated rules.
- Some scans may see no change to issue count or score if the new or updated rules do not apply to your specific digital asset.
These changes apply only to automated scans run on or after March 30th. All previously completed scans will remain unchanged.
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