Many Hands
October is harvest season, and nobody brings in a harvest alone. It takes a crew, and it takes everyone knowing which rows are theirs.
Accessibility work runs the same way. Most sites get fixed by a team: someone scanning, someone testing, a developer making the changes, a client signing off. This month’s updates make that team easier to run, with clearer access, cleaner handoffs, and fewer moments where you’re left guessing what happened.
New Updates in AAArdvark
Here’s what’s new in the AAArdvark accessibility testing platform:
- Team Management, Rebuilt – When you run accessibility work across a team or for clients, you need to know who can see what. You can pick a new member’s teams right on the invite form, see every team’s members and sites at a glance, and find your workspace’s people, pending invitations, and roles on their own Users page under Manage Workspace. Each site’s Teams settings list everyone with access and why, and removing a team tells you how many people will lose access before it happens. Each team also gets a single screen for adding or removing its users and sites.
- Excel Exports Your Developers Can Work From – If you’ve been copying fix guidance out of the app and into a spreadsheet, you can stop. The Excel export now includes “What it means” and “How to fix” for every issue, plus the details for each instance. Statuses use the same words you see in the app, and page links are full URLs, so the file makes sense to someone who has never logged in.
- PDF Scanning, Now in Beta – The PDFs on your site are pages too, and they’re often the ones nobody checks. AAArdvark can now scan them against PDF/UA, the accessibility standard for PDFs, with a results view for each document and PDF stats on your site dashboard. It also flags image-only PDFs, the scanned pages with no real text behind them, which a screen reader can’t read at all. We’re turning it on gradually, so just hit reply if you’d like to try it.
- A Few Smaller Things
- Cancel a running scan – Stop a scan from the site dashboard, and AAArdvark keeps the results from the pages it already reached.
- Help is one shortcut away – Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows) to search every AAArdvark guide without leaving what you’re doing.
- Emails that read well anywhere – Every email AAArdvark sends is rebuilt to look right on your phone, with links that make sense to screen reader users and subject lines that start with [AAArdvark]. If you’ve set up inbox rules based on our old subject lines, give them a quick check.
- Missing previews come with a reason – When an issue instance has no preview image, it tells you why, like when the element sat inside a closed menu at scan time.
Coming Soon
Here’s what’s next on the vine:
- Suggested Fixes – For some of the most common issues, like missing alt text, unlabeled form fields, and low text contrast, AAArdvark will suggest a fix right on the issue screen. You review each suggestion and decide what to use. We’re testing it with our own team first.
What We’ve Been Up To
- New Founder Blog Post: Accessibility Is Everyone’s Job, Which Is Why It’s Nobody’s
- Conference Sponsorships: We were proud to sponsor two free, 24-hour accessibility events this fall: Inclusive Design 24 in September and WordPress Accessibility Day in October. Thank you to the organizers, the speakers, and everyone who tuned in. Every ID24 session is on YouTube if you missed it. Registered for WordPress Accessibility Day? Session recordings are available to you through October 31st.
- Join the upcoming livestream: Roast My Component: Live Keyboard and Screen Reader Testing. We’ll test everyday components live with a keyboard and a screen reader, and show the fix for every failure we find.
Bring It In
Harvest season is about gathering what you’ve grown and sharing it around. Accessibility work grows the same way: one fixed issue, one tested page, one teammate at a time. However big your crew is, we’re glad to be part of it.
Thanks for working alongside us 🌾
The AAArdvark Team