Back to School
September has a way of sharpening things. New term, fresh notebooks, a timetable on the wall. Back to school was never about finishing a subject. It’s about starting one, and knowing what comes next.
That’s the spirit of this month’s updates. AAArdvark used to hand you a list of issues and leave the rest to you. Now it tells you where each site stands, what stage you’re at, and what to do next. Here’s what changed.
New Updates in AAArdvark
Here’s what’s new in the AAArdvark accessibility testing platform:
- Your Sites Now Come With a Syllabus – The Accessibility Score is one piece of something bigger: the app now walks you through the whole process, from first scan to manually tested. A list of issues never answered “is this good?” or “what do I do first?” Now it answers both.
- A grade for every site – Every site has an Accessibility Score, a letter grade with a 0 to 100 score behind it.
- The grade reflects how much testing you’ve done – An automated scan on its own tops out at a B, no matter how clean it comes back. Reviewing your potential issues and running manual testing in Visual Mode is what lifts that ceiling. Every grade shows its stage: Automated only, In testing, or Manually tested.
- A workspace dashboard that sorts itself – Your Sites is now a triage list. Each site shows its grade, where it sits in the workflow, and one next action. Sites that need you rise to the top.
- A site dashboard that leads with where you stand – Each site opens with its grade, your testing coverage, and what to do next based on your role on that site.
- Progress you can show – A Trend Report and a white-label PDF report round it out, so you can watch progress over time and hand a branded report to a client.
- Manual Testing Progress You Can Actually See – Manual testing is what lifts a site past a B, and until now nothing on the dashboard showed whether it was happening or who was doing it. A new progress card and overview banner on the site dashboard track how far manual testing has come on that site. In-app notifications tell a tester when pages land on their plate, and can let admins know when those pages get marked tested. If you’re running testing across a team, you no longer have to ask.
Coming Soon
A couple of things are still in the workshop:
- Guided Manual Testing – We’re working on step-by-step tests in the browser extension that walk you through the checks a scanner can’t make. Keyboard and tab-order testing with a visual tab-order overlay, plus tests for images, forms, and multimedia. The extension will spot which tests a page can’t fail and skip them, then give you a per-page results summary when you’re done.
- Scheduled White-Label Reports – Soon you’ll be able to have your branded PDF report generated and emailed on a schedule, so clients and stakeholders get it without you remembering to send it. It builds directly on the white-label reports that landed this month.
What We’ve Been Up To
- New Founder Blog Post: A Scanner is not Guidance.
- Join the upcoming livestream: Accessibility Scores Explained: What a 98% Actually Means – tune in live and bring your questions.
Field Trip: WordPress Accessibility Day
WordPress Accessibility Day is back on October 7 and 8: 24 hours of free, online talks on building accessible WordPress sites, for developers, designers, content creators, and site owners in every timezone. AAArdvark is a Bronze sponsor this year.
It costs nothing to attend. Register for WordPress Accessibility Day, pick the sessions that fit your day, and say hello at our sponsor page while you’re there.
Keep Learning
Accessibility is a subject you keep studying, not a box you tick. Nobody graduates, and that’s the good part: there’s always a next lesson, and it’s always worth taking. We’re glad to be in the same classroom as teams who care about getting this right.
Thanks for learning with us 📚
The AAArdvark Team 🍂