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Home / Learning Center / Changelog 013: New Highlighter, Email Reports, and Settings Tools

Changelog 013: New Highlighter, Email Reports, and Settings Tools

Article PublishedMay 19, 2026Last UpdatedMay 19, 2026 Written bySteve Jones

New Highlighter, Email Reports, and Settings Tools

In a recent changelog livestream, we walked through one of the biggest Accessibility Checker releases in recent months, covering everything from long-awaited email reports to major improvements to the Front-End Highlighter and new tools for managing plugin settings across multiple websites. These updates are included in Accessibility Checker 1.40.0 and Accessibility Checker Pro 1.22.0.

This release focused heavily on usability and workflow improvements. We spent a lot of time refining how Accessibility Checker surfaces information, how users interact with accessibility issues on the front end, and how agencies and teams can manage settings across multiple websites more efficiently.

The livestream also included several smaller but important fixes aimed at improving scanning reliability, accessibility rule accuracy, and overall plugin stability.

Here’s a complete recap of what we covered.

Watch the Video

Video Transcript

Steve: [00:00:00] I think we’re live. 

William: It was quick today. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: But we weren’t quick. 

Steve: We weren’t quick. We’re a little late. Yeah. Let’s make sure let’s make sure everything’s working. Let me check.

Yeah, looks like we are going live. Cool. So how’s it going, William? Doing good? 

William: Yeah. 

No complaints today. It’s been nice and sunny all week. 

Steve: Yeah. We’re finally getting to this summer weather. 

William: It is forecast to snow next week.

Steve: Yeah. There’s always time for a surprise, right? 

William: Yep.

Steve: Cool. So yeah, we’ve been busy. [00:01:00] It’s been a month. 

William: Yes. 

Steve: We’ve been working hard on Accessibility Checker features, and we are excited to talk about those, but give it a few minutes to let things get set up and let anybody jump on if they’re joining.

All right. If anybody’s watching, welcome to the Accessibility Checker live stream. This is a live stream we try to have twice a month, but depending on releases, we sometimes we’ll have once a month. But we do our best to get on here every couple weeks to talk about Accessibility Checker and what’s new and what we’re working on.

If you’re not familiar with Accessibility Checker, it’s an automated accessibility scanning plugin to help your WordPress website become and [00:02:00] stay accessible. We have a free Accessibility Checker plugin on the WordPress.org plugin repository, or you could get it from equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker.

We have a premium add-on for the plugin that allows you to scan Custom Post Types and Taxonomies and Archive Pages and do full site scans of your whole website, whereas the free plugin typical- limits you to scanning one page or post at a time.

We have a slew of add-ons for Accessibility Checker.

We got an audit history add-on to track your coverage, your rule pass, your rules, your data, your history over time to see if you’re improving on accessibility or if there has been a regression in accessibility that you need to address.

We have a multisite add-on that allows you to manage and view stats at the network [00:03:00] level on a WordPress multisite, and we have an export add-on that allows you to export your scan data to CSV files.

So today’s theme is a New Highlighter, Email Reports, and Settings Tools.

So that’s a lot, William, right? 

William: But let’s talk about everything except the Email Reports. Let people discover that. I need a break. 

Steve: Why is that? Was it, was that a difficult feature to achieve? 

William: This was way harder than it should have been.

Email Reports

Steve: Yeah for those that don’t know I think we’ll start with Email Reports here and go through this a little bit. If you’ve listened to any of the previous live streams, you’ve probably heard us tease the Email Reports for quite some time, and it was definitely a feature that was a long time in the making, and it’s a feature that actually breaks Accessibility Checker outside of its box, and brings a connection between Accessibility Checker plugin and our Equalize- [00:04:00] our my.equalizedigital.com dashboard.

So why did this take so long? Why is it so complex? 

William: Because email is horrible. No, but we ran into a couple of roadblocks in securing this, handling emails, delivery rates, license checks because we- to, to properly authenticate a user, we need them to have some form of pre-shared key, like a license key, which we can generate a secure token from.

However, for free users did not have a license key, which, was a blocker, like immediately a blocker here. We needed some pre-shared key, so we had to figure out how to generate keys for all of our free users, make it possible to even get that connection. 

And yeah skipping aside all the technical hurdles this took, the final few percent took longer than the first [00:05:00] 95.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And that’s the way a lot of projects go, right? Yeah. Yeah. The last 10% is more is a multiplier more difficult than the first 90%. 

William: Yes. 

Steve: And a little bit of a technical insights into that too is in the AI age when you’re using a lot of assistance from AI, I feel like even that last 10% is even more difficult because- 

William: Yeah, you can do the first with AI, sometimes you can do the first 90% in no time. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: But then you have to fix the AI code in the end, and that was also a pretty challenging time. 

Steve: Yeah. It’s a little bit like a mirage, right? Or am I saying that right? Where like you look like you’re in the desert, and it looks like there’s an oasis over there and it looks like it’s just a few hundred yards or whatever.

But you keep walking and it keeps getting… you never get any closer. 

William: So- Yeah, like when you think you have a secure connection and you look and it says, “Return true,” [00:06:00] and does- Yeah … nothing to check. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: That’s, that, that’s, that’s typically AI. 

Steve: Yep. 

William: Pretend you’re doing a thing, but just bypass all the security.

Steve: Yeah. That’s a little bit of the trick of it is it makes you feel like you’re going really far really fast, but really to get something from there to production still takes about the same amount of time, it’s just you’re dividing the time a little bit differently. 

William: Yeah. 

You shift it to the back- … where the human has to be.

Steve: Exactly. So what does this mean for customers? So now free customers now have a license key. 

William: Yes, and they will have to get that from our website, but that now allows them to get access to our my.dashboard, as we call it. Currently, not a lot of features there for free users, but that will be changing pretty quickly.

But yeah, they now have access to emails. Previously, [00:07:00] free users would’ve not been able to see very easily global site stats. The free users typically see individual posts, and with them being able to receive this email, they will be able to now see, how many issues are on their site, how many errors, and also be able to see a comparison to the previous week.

Are you going up? Are you going down? 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: Scanning one post at a time, you don’t really know. Whereas this email collates that information so that we can tell them that. 

Steve: Yeah, totally. Cool. So let’s show it off. So I will caveat this with a little bit that we’re gonna try to be very mindful not to expose any of our license keys.

William: I have a free key that will only work in my local. So you can pull up my screen. 

Steve: Okay. 

William: I can paste that key. 

Steve: So let’s go through the- 

William: And I can show the free 

Steve: Yeah. So what we’ll do is… there’s a couple different paths here. If you’re a free user, there’s a path to [00:08:00] activating email reports, and then if you’re a Pro customer, there’s a little bit different of a path to activating email reports.

And the email reports are different between free and Pro as well. Free gets some of that summary data that William was talking about, and then Pro gets that data plus a little bit more. And we’re, we’ll show that, and we’ll try to generate these emails so we can show them live here. So I’m gonna pull up William’s screen.

You ready? 

William: Yep. 

Steve: All right, so we’re looking at William’s screen. 

William: Yep. So this is the Accessibility Checker welcome page, and as of version 1.40.0, the email reports are now available. So this is what a free user would see on the welcome screen. Just quick start, some documentation links, some general things.

So this is the welcome page. Not the most useful for a free user, but it, this will be the first page in the plugin so if we visit the [00:09:00] settings link in the left-hand menu, it takes you to general, and we now have this new tab at the top called Accessibility Reports, and it is tagged with a new bubble.

So if we click on that, this will be the page you’re seeing. You can see a screenshot of an example email. 634 issues. This might be my test site. That looks like the right number. So you can now input a free license key in this left panel. So if I just grab this test key, paste that key there. Don’t steal this key. It won’t work for you. And click the enable email reports button. It will activate, and you will be redirected to… the page will reload, then you will now see some more information, including how many total issues you have on the site. There’s a free key where you can disable email reports. It tells you the general features, scan all your content.

If you’re a Pro user, get the full issue [00:10:00] breakdown and get more detailed email reports, and there’s an upgrade button. And it does also say when the next report is due to go out, which here it says May 4th, which is correct because we send these emails every Monday. So that is it. That’s all that’s required.

On May the 4th, Star Wars Day- … this test site would receive an email with the number of issues found as well as some additional data. 

Steve: So if you… So just to take a step back, can you disable the email reports? So I wanna show… we have multiple users that get Accessibility Checker free from different places. So you can get Accessibility Checker free from EqualizeDigital.com/Accessibility-Checker, and you can get Accessibility Checker from WordPress.org, and you can also get Accessibility Checker from the [00:11:00] WooCommerce marketplace. So we have three places where people can be downloading the plugin.

But you need this key. So if you don’t have a key, if you’ve downloaded from WordPress.org for instance, and you don’t have a key, we have links here to get a free license key. So got the plugin from Equalize Digital, you should already have a license key in your dashboard.

There’s a link installed from WordPress.org. You can create an account on our my.equalizedigital site for free. Doesn’t cost anything, and you will get a license key that you can enter here. And if you’re not sure, just go create an account. It should be fine. If you already have an account, it’ll pop up that you already have an account.

So you can add that key back if you wanna show the example. 

William: Yep. And I do also want to be clear that everything that is inside of this plugin works absolutely the same as it did before without this key. Entering this key only gives you access to receiving the summary emails. The plugin, nothing has been locked behind this [00:12:00] plugin, behind the key, I mean- … everything is still available. All the scans, they work the same as they always have. You just now have this additional possibility to get email if you want. And by entering the key, activating it, you are opting in to send us the data we need to generate this summary. 

Steve: Yep.

Cool. 

William: So that’s it. That’s the full flow for a free user. They get… Click the button, get the email. Pretty simple on the surface. Under the hood, an awful lot happened there. 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, totally. So do we wanna show what an email looks like? 

William: Yes. Let me see if I can pull up an example on my local test site.

I will caveat this with the data might not be 100% up to date on my test site here. 

Oh, no, I can’t pull up on my test site. You may actually need to pull up- 

Steve: If you [00:13:00] do a little bit of talking, I will pull it up. 

William: Yeah. So I guess I can talk about the type of data that appears in the free email while Steve’s pulling this up. So you get the total issues found, which in this screenshot example here, 634.

The actual number on my test site is 601, so I would receive that number as the main body of the email. And we also get some additional coverage information such as how many URLs have been scanned. And in the free plugin, you only get pages and posts, but you might have additional taxonomies. We will call that out. Yeah, additional post types or additional taxonomies, because in the pro plugin, you can actually now scan individual taxonomy pages.

That was… What’s that last one? It might have been two changelogs ago we demoed that.

But yeah, if you are a pro user, we actually have some more information readily available for users, which I think Steve hopefully can pull up [00:14:00] to separate examples.

Steve: Yes. Give me one second. Pulling it up now. I will do it off of my own website as not to share anybody’s accessibility status. 

William: You’re picking the most boring stats. 

Steve: Yeah. I will caveat that my website’s pretty boring because it’s pretty safe, and because I’m an accessibility practitioner and professional, and my stuff should be accessible.

All so if we look here. Okay, so let me pull up my screen.

Okay. So what this is this is a preview of the email that would go to your inbox every Monday morning if you’re a free user. So of course, it’s just a branded email with Equalize Digital, and it shows this is for my website, stevejones.blog. My accessibility status is two issues found, and this is actually [00:15:00] up two from my last email that I generated. So this would’ve been a second email. When you get your first email, we don’t have this historic data. So with every email, it’ll benchmark it based on last week’s stats. So you can see. Now I can go, “Okay my website didn’t have any issues last week and now I pulled it. I got my email this Monday and it’s up two, so what happened? What did I put on the website that caused two issues to show up? Why is this up?” 

William: Yeah, I think the historical viewpoint really is quite useful for people because if you’re scanning individual posts you’ll be able to immediately see if the numbers are going up or down, but that doesn’t really tell you the full picture across your entire site. What if you make a change on one page that creates new issues on a different page, or you do one global fix, you don’t know how many it’s solved unless you scan all those pages. Now you will at least have an idea of, up or down, [00:16:00] which is a great signal, right? 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: You always want the number to be going down.

I think Steve probably is gonna go take a look at his website after this and figure out what has created two issues. 

Steve: Yeah, what’s going on. Yeah. And it’s right into your email box. It’s the first of the week, so you don’t even have to log into your website to see what’s going on.

The next step we have here is coverage. It tells you the total number of URL scanned. Like I said, my site is very small. There’s only 10 URLs being scanned. Post types checked, two of two. So you can see if there’s post types that you aren’t scanning that maybe you want to enable scanning for, or you wanna upgrade to Pro so you can scan all custom post types. And taxonomies checked is 0/0 because this is a free email report and you have to have Accessibility Checker Pro to scan taxonomies. And then we just have a little bit of, unlock a little bit of an upgrade message here to unlock full coverage reports to show free users that there is more data that can [00:17:00] be sent out through these emails.

So that is a free email. Let me switch back. So we should probably now go through the Pro email flow. I can do that, William? Yeah, let’s do it. Or do you wanna do it

William: I don’t have a local Pro key. I just quickly spun up this free key there. 

Steve: Yeah. So what I’ll do is I’ll disable email reports on mine so to give…

And I’ll make sure that I’m not exposing my actual live key. Okay.

So let’s take a look. So this is what it looks like if you have Accessibility Checker Pro and if you come to your settings pages now. So you would have your normal license key. So since you already have a license key, ’cause you’re a Pro customer, you don’t have to go get a new key. It’ll work with your existing Pro key.

So on the license tab, which I will not click on here as not to expose my license [00:18:00] key you just leave that the same. If your key’s active when you come to the accessibility reports tab all you have to do is click enable email reports. So I’ll click that button and it will make a connection to the my.equalizedigital.com website.

So we are connected. Easy as that, one click, and now you have emails coming to your inbox every Monday. 

William: So it looks like your website’s getting bad though. 

Steve: Yeah, I got six issues, total issues found. It’s gonna pull… I probably introduced an issue for every page or something globally.

So on this page for a Pro user, you have just your normal message that reports are enabled and that the next report’s going out on May the fourth be with you, Star Wars Day, which is coming Monday. We shoulda had a Star Wars theme here, William. We should have. 

William: We should have. We missed the trick.[00:19:00] 

Steve: Yeah. And then the next box to the right shows that you have full coverage in your email report. Since you are running Pro, your reports include all post types and taxonomies, full-site scanning enabled, complete issue breakdowns and detailed reporting. And then it shows a summary of the total issues currently found on your website that will be pulled over for the email reports, and then an account connection button to disconnect if you would like to disconnect from receiving email reports.

So I’m going to switch back here to us, and then I’m going to generate a Pro email so you can als-

William: If you pull up my screen, I can actually show you what the… I have a broken logo, but other than that, I have a Pro email up. 

Steve: Oh, okay. You already have it up. 

William: Yeah. So just generate this based on my test site.

So [00:20:00] 385 issues in the data that was sent which is down 12 from, down 12% from last time I shipped this email. It says 56 URLs. I’m only scanning two out of four of the post types, and there’s no taxonomy scanning available. It does also show in this right-hand side for Pro users the total number of problems, which is the same as this number here. Total number of need review items as well, which h- isn’t in this number, but it should be in this number. This is just a quirk with have a fake this data. And it shows you your percentage of passed checks, which in the case of this test site is 55.81 across all of our checks on all of the pages that have been scanned.

In addition, we also have another section for the most problematic pages, and this is- Quite boring for my website because I don’t always give [00:21:00] them titles. But if I were to click on one of these, it would take me right to the page, and, this one with no title was the most problematic page. I’ve probably purposefully added 500 issues to that one page.

But yeah, you can click on any of these five links and it will take you directly to it. And in addition, we also surface the most severe issues on your website, which is grouped by highest count and highest severity. So on this test website, all of the top five most severe issues are high severity, but you could have a low severity or a medium severity issue here or even a critical.

But it breaks that down by how many counts. So it seems like on my test site, if I fix color contrast problems, that would be the biggest bang for my buck because there’s 298, and probably a lot of them are global across my entire website.

Steve: Cool. So- 

William: Actually [00:22:00] scanned 56 pages, 55 of them have possible heading issues. That probably means every page aside from the homepage, so that would also be a quick win. 55 issues fixed with one probably simple theme change.

Improper use of link. Yeah, so all of these are the most severe issues, and these will always be the biggest bang for your buck to fix them.

And there, there’s a view all link. If you click on this, it will take you to your own website directly to the open issues page, where you can see all these issues listed out. 

Steve: Yeah. Cool. So that is the pro email reports. And William is pulling this from his local, that’s why he’s got a little bit of a broken image there at the top.

But so let’s talk a little bit about recipient. So this was part of the- 

William: This was the most complicated decision ever. Right [00:23:00] now the person who owns the license key will receive the email. In a fast follow relatively soon we will make some configuration options available so that other people can pick multiple recipients, so that you could send this to… you receive it yourself, but maybe the stakeholder receives it, the person who deals with content the person who’s hired you. If, this is a client website, you can make sure that they get those emails. But for the moment, they go only to the license holder of, either the pro key or the free key, depending on what type you have.

But yeah, only to the account holder currently, but very soon to whoever- You think needs to see the emails is probably… a lot of us work on websites where the site owner maybe doesn’t look at these reports. They don’t log into the website very often. They’re busy, it means almost all the time.

Now they can get this email report every [00:24:00] Monday, keep an eye on whether the number’s going up or the number’s going down. 

Steve: Yeah, totally. So this was actually part of the scope of the project that we have worked on in that, this is one of these hard product decisions you make when you’re building product and you’re making software for people, and when you’re trying to achieve a certain level of quality and a certain level of security and a certain level of making sure we’re following regulations and laws and things like that.

And when you’re sending emails, there are definitely, things to consider, and can spam laws and things like that. So- 

William: Opt-in, double opt-in. 

Steve: Yeah. 

William: Yeah … unsubscribe, global unsubscribes. It is a bit of a minefield. It was actually one of the most challenging things that I expected to be simple. 

Steve: Yeah.

But 

William: it’s not. 

Steve: From a programmatic standpoint it’s pretty simple to add a comma-separated list of [00:25:00] emails and send it to them, right? But it becomes much more complicated to get them to opt in than to give them a method to opt out if they want. 

William: Yeah. So I’ll put this as a teaser.

How do you opt out a user who does not have an account on your website? There is a solution. It’s straightforward once it’s hard to work out. 

Steve: Yeah. So we are refining that feature, and we’re actually trying to build onto that feature. This is a little bit of a tease for the fu- for what’s coming, is that we’re trying to…

We’re building a kind of an opt-in or a double opt-in feature so that when an administrator of the email reports adds somebody as an email, they need to confirm that they want to receive those emails, and then they can unsubscribe on a per email basis. But we’re also looking at taking this summary data that you’re getting in your email reports and aggregating it into a little bit of a dashboard to where you could look at all your websites that you have connected in the [00:26:00] dashboard and see historical accessibility trends on those websites in one unified dashboard on the my.equalizedigital.com dashboard.

So that’s something that’s coming in the future, that’s something that’s already been worked on. It’s something that we actually had in here, and we pulled back a little bit to make sure that we are doing our part to be in alignment with regulations around sending emails and opting people in and out of emails.

Anything else to add on the email side, William? 

William: No, nothing else here. This is very useful for users, very simple on the surface. Thousands of lines of code under there to make this happen. 

Steve: Yeah. If you haven’t connected your plugin for email reports, I would go ahead, connect it, and we will start sending those reports and keeping you up to date on the status of the accessibility on your website.

But that’s not [00:27:00] all. That’s a big feature. We could have spent this whole episode talking about that, but we have more. What else did we do? 

William: I don’t want to. 

Steve: What else did we do? 

William: Yeah, so this one’s actually, a nice and easy one to show if you want to pull up my screen. It’s easier to show and tell at the same time.

Steve: Yep. I’m pulling your screen, William’s screen up. 

William: Oh, actually I think I’m skipping ahead. I’m skipping forward. 

Steve: No, that’s all right. 

William: Yeah, ignore my grammar only for all these made up words. So we added a new format option. Oh, maybe I don’t… May- maybe you need to pull up your screen.

I don’t have the right branch pulled. Oh it’s because I didn’t build it. 

Steve: Yeah, that’s all right. That’s all right. I got it. 

William: Yeah.

Screen reader only text format for block editor

Steve: No problem. So screen reader text, right? 

William: Yes. 

Steve: Screen reader text is a beautiful thing to help [00:28:00] us give context to screen reader users and not create verbose or visual, descriptions inside of the… in text for visual users that may be disruptive or redundant, right?

William: Yep. 

Steve: And we have been using the screen reader text format plugin I don’t remember the exact name of that plugin off the top of my head, but for many years now writing content and utilizing that, and we felt like it was time to bring that into the Accessibility Checker family and it, and bring that to all of our 15,000 plus users and do some refinements on it and extend it a little bit and this is how it works.

We added a new format to any block that has text in it, right? So if you select your text, so the best example is an [00:29:00] ambiguous link, right? You wanna try to prevent ambiguous links on your website. So if I have a button and I say “learn more,” right? So that’s not really descriptive on what that link is. If I’m using a screen reader and it’s going, and I’m tabbing through the focusable elements on the page and I get to a link and it just says learn more. 

William: Yeah, but for a user to figure out where this link goes, they would actually have to read out the link. 

Steve: Read out the URL.

William: Which is a horrible experience. 

Steve: Very long and time-consuming and annoying to listen to.

William: Yep. 

Steve: So at, but at first they would just hear learn more. Okay, learn more about what? And of course, if you’re reading the whole page out you would have just in the order of the page, you might have context to where it’s at. If there’s a proper header and then text and then the link, you could probably deduce where that’s going.

But going off to a link can be disruptive to the flow of using a keyboard on a website because if you’re, “Okay I wanna learn more,” and then [00:30:00] it takes you off to another website, that could be disruptive and problematic. So you wanna describe it. In this case, I would say, “Learn more about screen reader text,” right?

But that looks very long, and it’s kinda redundant if I have a header up here that just says screen reader if this is like a post teaser or something. And so this is for a visual user to visually see on the page. So what you can do is you can actually add the about screen reader text as screen reader text.

I said text a million times there. But, so if you’re in a text block and you highlight the text and then you go over to the little caret here, and you go down to screen reader only, click that. So now I have a pink highlight around that text, so that lets me, in the editor, see that, oh, this is going to be [00:31:00] hidden. And then if I hover I get a little tool tip that says, “This is screen reader text.” But I still have a underline to visually see it. But in the Accessibility Checker sidebar here, you can toggle this off. So there’s a new panel called screen reader text format, control whether the screen reader text stays visible while you edit. And I have it set to always show screen reader text.

Is that by default? 

William: The default is this is off unchecked. 

Steve: Okay. The default is this way. So if I uncheck that, now I’m back to just learn more on my button. Oh, okay. That’s what I wanted. But for a screen reader, it actually has the whole text here, and you can actually see I have some above in the text here that I’ve hidden as examples, and if I toggle always show screen reader text off again, they all go away.

William: Yep. 

Steve: So- 

William: Now I do want to call out at this point that they’re not actually [00:32:00] lost. 

Steve: No. 

William: If you are editing this content, even with this box unchecked, you can still reach these as part of the editing flow. If you were to enter one of the blocks, it will appear. 

Steve: Yep. 

William: Yeah. 

Steve: So just like that. So on my button, if I click and activate inside my button, it then highlights, but it only highlights that one.

If I go up to this text up here, it’ll only highlight the one within the block. So this is so that you don’t ever forget or lose the screen reader text, and you can… and so you can edit it if need be. Okay? 

William: And prior to this being available as a format in the editor, this type of thing would usually be relegated to people who are able to write the actual HTML code. You would have to manually edit the HTML, or in most cases, you would usually have to have a developer build a custom a component here for button that enabled these features. Now, that’s no longer required. If [00:33:00] you’re editing the content, you can get the screen reader text added with the default formatter pattern that is already in the block editor.

Steve: Yep. So if I view the front end here, you can see I just have a button that says learn more, and then if I view the source here… Let me see if I can well, it doesn’t enlarge the inspector, does it? Oh, here we go. So I have the link. It says learn more, and then I have a span with a class of text format SR only, which hides that for everybody except for screen readers.

So this was just a a little utility and formatter feature that we’ve added into the plugin. And we’ve taken a little bit of a step forward, and we actually made it work inside the block, the the full site editor as well. Let me see if I can pull [00:34:00] that up. 

William: Yeah, so this is exactly where you would typically have to have someone that is able to edit the code to make these changes for you. Whereas now you will be able to just do it with normal formatting sense in inside of the template editor from full site.

Steve: Yeah. Maybe I should go back to pages.

Templates, let’s go to template. Let’s go to…

William: Pick a sample page. 

Steve: Which one? 

William: I think you have a sample, but just any page template. 

Steve: Single post? 

William: Yeah. I think this might have been the one you were on, but this is the same. 

Steve: Yeah. So but I actually need something. Let’s actually go back. Let’s do it in… so you could even do it in a global…

on your archive page, [00:35:00] if you had, I need to get something global in here. Yeah, here we go. 

William: You have to click on the text below. This is the tail block. 

Steve: That’s the loop. If I had, learn more about screen reader text, right? And then I just wanted this to not be there.

Screen reader text only. Works here in the FSE or full site editor. Cool kids call it FSE. 

William: And it does work exactly the same here, but how do you get to the checkbox? 

Steve: Yeah. So we don’t have Accessibility Checker in FSE yet. We should at some point in time, but we don’t have it here. But we can still toggle those same settings on and off, and you do that through the… in the top toolbar, you go to the ellipses menu, the options menu right at the end, and then you scroll down to always show screen reader text, [00:36:00] and I can toggle that on and now it always shows it. Let me toggle that off. And I gotta click out of the block for it to go away. So with that off, you don’t see it. If you activate the plugin, then you can see the screen reader text that you added. If you go to the options menu, which is the ellipses menu on the far right of the toolbar, and you click always show screen reader text, it will show it just the same as it does on the single post.

So we’ve taken the screen reader text, brought it into Accessibility Checker, made some improvements, made some updates to how modern block editor works. We’ve brought that feature over to FSE so that you can have that there. And now all of the users of Accessibility Checker have access to this.

Cool? [00:37:00] 

William: Yep. 

Steve: But that’s not it. There’s more. How is there more, William? 

William: Because we waited a month before we done another one of these change logs.

Frontend Highlighter UI Update

Steve: That’s right. So if you’ve been using Accessibility Checker for any length of time, you’re probably familiar with our Front-End Highlighter. So which allows you to go to the front end and highlight the accessibility issues, and gives you information about them, and so that you can identify exactly where on the page the issue is. And you can see the code and you can disable styles, so if it’s something that’s hidden in a menu or something, and all that.

We introduced the Front-End Highlighter as part of the … We were the accessibility team on building NASA’s new websites, and we introduced this as a a feature request from NASA, and it has been working for a couple years.

And we thought now it was time to, with some of the UI [00:38:00] changes we’ve made in the sidebar and on our metabox we thought it was time to bring the Front-End Highlighter kinda in line with some of those UI changes. Without yapping on about it too long, let’s just take a look at it.

Let me pull something up here.

Let me pull up an example post for you guys.

All right. So I’m gonna share my screen. Cool. So this wasn’t necessarily a, … Let me move William and I out of the way so you guys can see. This wasn’t necessarily something- 

William: That would have been a good opportunity to show one of the features, actually 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, to show the little icon in the bottom here regardless.

But so this wasn’t really something we were planning to do, but a, one of those i- inspirational [00:39:00] midnight vibe coding experiments kinda turned into, “Hey, we could probably do this pretty quick and add a lot of value here.” And then, that expanded into about a week of kind of playing around with UI and UX and trying to think about more deeply about how things are laid out in our Front-End Highlighter and do a lot of refinements there.

So if you’re on a post you can click our little icon in the bottom right-hand corner. If you have your settings set to show this on the left-hand corner, it will be on the left-hand corner. So I will activate it, and it pulls up. So this is the Front-End Highlighter, and as you can see, it looks totally different.

It actually, the UI now aligns with changes that we’ve made in the back end where we’re pulling in the theme color. That’s why you have this bright blue bar. And we’re a- I’m actually running WordPress 7, which is not out. It will be out here in a [00:40:00] few weeks, I think, towards the end of next month. 

William: Two weeks.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. So we used to have two panels here, and we’ve unified these into one panel so that we can create a cohesive user experience from, having a header bar and having the title and having the information, and then the description and then an explanation and an affected code. And then in the footer of the highlight panel, we have the controls. So basically some pagination tells you how many issues you have, what issue you’re on, and next and previous buttons.

William: But didn’t there used to be other buttons down here? 

Steve: Yeah, there used to be other buttons under there.

So as features have been added to the Front-End Highlighter buttons have just been added and without a lot of thought to, “Hey, this is getting to be a lot of buttons. We need to think about how we can expose these actions without cluttering the UI.” So what we’ve done in [00:41:00] regards to actions inside the plugin, we’ve created an ellipses menu in the header bar right next to the the close button for the modal here and right next to the heading.

So if I click that ellipses menu, now I’m presented with these options. I can move it left- I can dock the panel, I can rescan the page, I can clear the issues, and I can disable styles.

So there’s some new ones in here, but let’s talk about the ones that aren’t new first. So let’s go to the bottom of the list. Disable styles. So this was here before, but now you can just click it and your styles are disabled on the page. And why do you wanna disable your styles? Because there’s elements that are hidden sometimes. A lot of times there’s a hamburger menu for a mobile menu that may have accessibility issues inside of it, and you can’t see it.

And Accessibility Checker does its best to tell you if it… if the element is actually hidden from the viewport at that time, and tells you [00:42:00] to, “Hey, maybe you want to disable styles so you can see this.” And if styles are disabled, if I go back to the actions menu here, I can re-enable the styles and we’re back.

Other actions that are the same is our rescan and our clear issues. So if I’ve made a change and I just wanna rescan this page, or if I’m just playing around with… I’m inspecting elements and I’m modifying them to see if I can actually simulate an accessibility fix on the page I can rescan it straight from here. So if I hit the rescan button, boom, rescan, super quick. No problem. If I’m having some issues with the page or something doesn’t feel right, like it, like the scan is stale or something, I can ensure that it’s not stale by clearing, straight up clearing the issues. And now I have none, and then I can then rescan from there.

If you do close out of the menu and reactivate it, it will scan and [00:43:00] present you with the issues. And then that’s the new items that are here.

So move left, what does that do? So you have a setting inside Accessibility Checker where you can define where this highlighter panel goes on the right or left, but now you can just switch it in real time on the page. “Hey, this is in my way. Move that to the left.” If I wanna move it- 

William: Yeah. I have had an issue where the panel would overlay issues in, like a further navigation, for example. And I would have to close it to find those issues. Now no longer need to. Yeah. 

Steve: Yeah, so now once it’s on the left, I can move it right.

And say I don’t want to necessarily move it right or left, I just wanna get it out of the way, I this whole blue header bar, I can just click on it and drag it wherever I want it. I want it over here while I’m looking at this, as I’m going through, I’ll just click and drag it.

But we wanna make things… we still wanna make our plugin as [00:44:00] accessible itself as we can, and drag and drop like this is something that is, is very it’s kinda hard to simulate with a keyboard. You could do you can let them increment by X number of pixels for every up or down or left to right arrow, but it’s not a very smooth experience.

That’s why we have the move left and the the move actions in the actions panel is so that we’re providing two ways to do this. You can click and drag the panel around or you can do the move left and move right. What you will notice if you do click and drag the panel around the shift left and shift right are not there.

There’s actually a reset position, so you can actually reset it to its original position. If the position was left and you started dragging it and you reset it, it resets it to the left side. So we’re providing ways for mouse users to fluidly drag around the panel, and we’re pr- creating ways for keyboard users to be able to [00:45:00] move it out of the way if they see fit as well too.

But that’s not it. There’s another option here. So we can dock the panel. So now if I go to dock panel, so no longer is the highlighter modal floating on top of the page. It’s now docked to the right and it pushes the page over, and this allows me to have a much taller panel that I can go through and see the page and the panel all in one view without them overlapping each other.

And you can do the same move left action here. And when it moves left, it’s actually docked on the left, and then I can move it back and then I can undock the panel as well. So why do we wanna dock the panel? Because we are actually working on new things for the highlighter and we want more vertical space here to be able to put more [00:46:00] things in.

But that being said, we have put more things in here than what was in there before. So what we’ve brought forward as far as the content area of the highlighter panel is we have the title. In this case, I’m on an improper use of a link. And now we pull over whether it’s a problem or it needs review with the same badges that we are using in the backend.

We’ve pulled forward the WCAG guideline, so you now have a quick link to that. That will jump off to that so you can review here without having to go to the backend and find this link. And we are surfacing the severity. In this case, this is a high severity. We have the same description. We have a summary description, and then we now have a toggle here to show explanation, and this shows what the why it matters and how to fix with a link to our documentation so you can get a full breakdown on how to resolve this issue. So [00:47:00] before, in the highlighter, we only exposed the how to fix, now we’re giving you more information.

And this is actually for Pro users William? 

William: Correct. So this data does only exist if you have the Pro plugin. However, if you still have a how to fix link- Yeah … and that link does take to the full documentation we have on our website where both this why it matters and the how to fix is available.

Steve: Yeah. 

William: It just isn’t gonna be available here- Right here … unless you have the Pro plugin. 

Steve: So in the Pro plugin you’ve already engaged. You’re a pro. We consider you a pro user at that point, and that you’re using this in real remediations with real clients. And we don’t want you to have to click back and forth so much so we’re exposing that data here.

Now, the free user can get access to the same exact data as a Pro user can here. You just have to click off to our website to see it which is this more details documentation link. [00:48:00] It’s the same link.

And then we have the toggle here for show affected code, which was available previously in the Front-End Highlighter, and we’ve just kept that here and just improved the UI around that.

One thing that we have done too is if you toggle open the show explanation or the show affected code it will be persistent as you toggle through issues on the page. So if you wanna look at code, you just keep going and did you guys see that? Did you see what popped up? Oh, there it is. So this is an example of an issue where we actually have one of our one-click fixes. And we have a button where it says fix issue, and we present you with the ability to remove tab index from focusable elements. So I can check this and hit save. It’ll rescan, and that issue will actually be remediated at that point. So the same with the show explanation, that will be [00:49:00] persistent as you navigate through all the issues on your page.

So that is our updated Front-End Highlighter.

Anything else to add, William? 

William: Did you have a teaser for why we might want to dock this?

Oh, my lamp just went out. I didn’t realize. I’m very dark. 

Steve: He’s in the dark. We could tease. You want to tease? Let me… 

William: I figure you might have it open 

Steve: So I have to actually pull open a branch and rebuild, but so you talk while I do that.

William: Yeah. So now that we have all of this additional space, when the the Front-End Highlighter is docked we have some useful features that maybe we will be able to fill that space with. There’s a couple of things when you’re remediating websites, or just when you’re looking at the content of websites, where you might want to see [00:50:00] what the shape of the website looks like in terms of how a screen reader might see this, or how a machine might look at it.

Which, hopefully we will be able to do in the not too distant future. 

Steve: Yeah. So this is a little bit of a tease. I wasn’t planning to show this, but since William brought it up, why not, right? 

William: I don’t have anything on my side that I can tease. 

Steve: Cool. So why do we need more vertical space?

Let’s take a look. Let me dock this panel. So this is a new feature that we’ve actually been rolling around these ideas for years, and we just haven’t rolled them into the plugin yet. But with all the UI stuff that- 

William: Have the space to fit them … 

Steve: Yeah, we didn’t. Yeah, the UI actually was a little bit of a blocker.

So now that we’ve rethought the UI, we can start to implement more things in here more easily. And that was the whole ethos around redoing UI for the Front-End Highlighter, was to make it [00:51:00] ready to receive more features and more things.

So I have the Front-End Highlighter up.

I have it docked to the right-hand side here, and you’ll notice that there’s now four tabs here at the top. And of course, the first tab is our issues tab, and then there’s a headings, landmarks, and tab order. So this is not released, but these are features that we’re hoping to get out pretty soon, and I’m pretty sure this is coming to free users, so it’s a little bit of a free thing.

So if I go to headings I now have a headings map of the headings on the page, and I can click through to these and it’ll actually highlight them and scroll to them, just like our highlighter does with everything else. And then you’ll see here I have an H2, and then the next one’s an H6. That’s not right. You’re supposed to follow semantic heading orders, right? 

William: [00:52:00] Yep. 

Steve: So it’s highlighted in red with a little warning icon to show that that you have skipped heading levels here that you probably should fix. And the heading orders tab in and the amount, like an H1’s not tabbed in, but H2’s tabbed in once, and H6 is tabbed in five times. And you can see that the tab, the visual tab order is off here because it’s actually the wrong heading. It should be an H3, and that would bring it back in line and remove the error label here.

But you can go down your page and just click on these and it’ll scroll to. And this just helps…

And if you actually do have a, an issue like skipped heading, like you can see here that there’s actually an issue related to that needs to be remediated. So it, as you fix your issues, like if I… Incorrect heading order, if I click on that heading, it says “Incorrect heading order,” and it tells you how to fix it.

And as you [00:53:00] fix issues, the heading map will update accordingly. 

William: Nice. 

Steve: So we have another tab here called Landmarks. So currently we have… And I’m… So this is beta stuff so I’m gonna be brave and try something here in a minute. But you can do the same thing. You can click on these and it will highlight them.

And this is a current feature in the plugin. If you’re in the back end and you click on a landmark, it will click over and highlight it.

William: And- 

Steve: And 

William: previously you weren’t able to see this map, right? 

Steve: And- 

William: You could just get to the landmark from there.

Steve: And this will show the accessible name of the landmarks as well.

Like these are actually labeled two and three. There’s, in the footer, there’s two navigations. One’s labeled two and one’s labeled three. You should give it an ARIA label with a descriptive name, and I would say two and three is not descriptive. This navigation element up here actually has a label of toolbar, and then the main navigation has a label of post [00:54:00] navigation.

So we’re trying to show you here your landmarks and their accessible labels. Now, I wanna test something.

William: Like you didn’t pull up the other tab, which I haven’t actually tested myself yet. 

Steve: I’m going to click on a landmark and see if it actually highlights nav. Ooh, it went to it, but it didn’t highlight it.

Okay. Little bit of a bug, but this is beta, it’s not released. 

William: Yep. 

Steve: But it did scroll to it. So it will highlight here in the panel once you click Landmarks from the back end.

But we’ve got one final one here, tab order. Why does tab order matter, right? What… So for good accessibility, you wanna make sure that you have a tab order that follows the visual order of the page left to up to down up, down, right?

You wanna be mindful not to be modifying tab [00:55:00] indexes as to throw this off. But if I click on Tab Order here, I’m now presented with a scribble across my page as it looks, right? But what this is this is a visual representation of the tab order. So all the focusable elements on the page have a little red circle with a number in them. And I’m not sure if red’s the right color to use here, ’cause red in kinda what we do means bad. So I’m not sure if it’s gonna end up being red or if we switch it to our like highlighter pink or blue or something to kinda neutralize it to not make it seem like it’s a bad thing. But anyway.

William: Talking of bad things, having this lane here immediately shows me that the tab index is- 

Steve: Yeah … 

William: horrible. Horrible at the beginning. 

Steve: Yeah. So you can see I added a link here, it’s called Wrong Tab Index, and then I gave it a tab index that was wrong, and you can see in the panel that it’s actually, it’s highlighted as wrong. I’m not sure why this is orange. Probably [00:56:00] should be red. But it shows that… And I can click on this in the panel and it will scroll, too. So if I go through and I’m like, “Okay, what’s my tab order?” Without actually tabbing through the page, ’cause sometimes your page doesn’t have proper focus outlines and you can’t really tell where you’re at, the page that you’re remediating.

So I click on the first one. Oh, wait, hold on. This is further down. 

William: Halfway down the page. 

Steve: That’s not neg- That’s not right. And, the highlighter is signifying that this is not right, but the rest are. So when I start clicking through those and, they all follow the order. And we give a little label on each highlight here that says the tab stop and what it is. These are links. What else? We got a text area here. So we’re trying to highlight what the actual focusable element is, and sometimes that can be helpful, too. Like that’s a submit, and I think all the rest are links. So you can just follow these down the page, make sure your tab order is correct.

[00:57:00] So that is- 

William: Or faint that shows where it isn’t correct as- Yeah … 

Steve: this 

William: exactly shows. 

Steve: Yeah, at the very top. Yep.

So these are a few little utilities that we’re trying to bring into the highlighter to help you remediate your page and to kinda give you a little bit more information on what may be the problem, and a little bit more visual information as well to help identify where the problems are.

So that’s an upcoming thing, and thanks William, who is sitting in the dark here for- It’s 

William: same for me. My camera doesn’t like it. 

Steve: So that’s a lot for the release. Now, we do have more that was in this release. Do we wanna kinda like lightning round this and go through like- 

William: Yeah, sure … 

Steve: some of these?

Minor Fixes

Steve: Okay. Cool. So minor fixes that were also in, in the latest releases of Accessibility Checker and Accessibility Checker Pro.

Added a modifier class to suppress visual file size/type output where needed

William: Yeah, so in the Pro plugin we have a feature that allows adding the [00:58:00] file size and type onto links so people are aware of what they might be getting when they click that link. Sometimes it breaks layouts, which has been a complaint from us and at least one user, so now there’s a modifier class that will allow you to turn that off. It will retain it in the label, so for screen readers it will still be accessible, but it will avoid breaking your layout by injecting that text there.

Full site scan now fails posts with invalid scan URLs instead of attempting to scan them.

William: Next thing a- and I actually had to enhance this feature this morning. So we now have a fail handler in the full-site scanner for the Pro users where if a post fails to scan properly in a situation where it’s completely broken and breaks our scanner, we now try our best to skip that. And I did fix that even more to make it even more robust this morning. So in the next Pro release that will be solved, and specifically where this has come up is privacy policy links. So turns out on some sites editors [00:59:00] can’t change them, which means we can’t appropriately scan and save results to them.

Pro license check can now recover during periodic license rechecks.

William: Next in the list, so Pro license checks. Every day we check if a Pro license is still active. If it’s not, it can disable on your site. If there’s a network issue, it could also technically disable on the site, so I added a recovery mechanism. So if there’s a network error, next time it does a check it can reactivate. No longer will you hopefully have to go in and click the Enter license key button ever again.

Orphaned issue cleanup now runs twice daily for fresher issue data

William: Orphaned issues. So we have a cleanup routine. Once a day we try and clear 50 orphaned issues. If you’ve switched post types, edited your content, deleted the post in a non-standard way. One user contacted us and pointed out that it was taking quite a long time. He had shifted 900 events to a different post type, orphaned in those issues. Now it runs twice a day, so it will delete up to 100 per day. Hopefully you don’t [01:00:00] ever have that many orphaned issues, but if you do, we’ll clean them quicker.

Missing Table Header checks now correctly skip tables marked with role=”presentation” or role=”none”

William: Table checks. So now our missing header rule will detect proper scopes.

So if you have a header that has a scope of the full row, no longer will the other columns flag as a missing header. It will also skip if your table has a rule of presentation, so it’s just a little bit more clever about how it identifies appropriate headers on the table. Previously, if you didn’t have a TH column or a TH for each row, it wouldn’t consider that as valid markup when there is actually some parents, so on.

And yeah, I think that’s all the minor fixes.

There’s one major thing if you wanna quickly build that up or mention that, Steve. It’s above the minor fixes in the list. 

Steve: Oh yeah, we skipped one, didn’t we? 

William: We did. 

Steve: Oh, okay. There’s more. This is like Christmas, your parents have given you the big…

you got your gift from Santa Claus, [01:01:00] you got your gift from your parents, and you’re like, you’re jazzed, right? Yeah. As a little kid. And then in walks- 

William: Your cousin shows up at the end. 

Steve: Yeah. Then w- in walks that favorite uncle with a big old present right at the end. Ooh, and there’s more, right? So there is more.

I did skip. So we did lightning round. Those are more features coming that are already out. They’re there for you. And William’s done a great job in getting those in the latest release.

Import/Export for backing up and restoring plugin settings and fixes as JSON

Steve: But we do have another thing to show. We are running short on time, but we’re gonna try to be fast with it.

So we’ve added this- 

William: But this one saves people a lot of time if they have more than one site. 

Steve: Yeah. So we’ve added the ability to import and export settings from the backend. This is a Pro feature for Pro users. So you can export your settings as JSON files, and you can import your settings into another site with the same JSON file.

So- Yeah, 

William: so if you maintain 15 sites, you’ll only need to configure one, grab the settings. I will [01:02:00] call out that anything that might be security adjacent, such as your token for email reports or your actual license key, does not come out in that export. So if you wanna export the settings file and share it with another user, you can do that just fine. It will not include your license key or any of the security information, but it will include all of the settings. So if you’ve configured your site in a specific way and someone else needs that file, you can give that to them. 

Steve: Yeah. Let me try to make things bigger here. Yeah. So if you’re running Accessibility Checker Pro version 1.22.0 then you will get this new feature. If you go to settings, you’ll see there is a fifth tab next to the new email reports called import/export. So export your Accessibility Checker settings to a JSON file, then import them on another website.[01:03:00] 

So we’ve got two columns here. In the left column, it says, “Export settings. Download your current settings to a JSON file.” And then I’ve got check boxes for include settings and include fixes. So I can choose to export all the settings by itself, or all the fixes by themselves, or everything by itself. So you may only want to update some of these settings on their site and not all their fixes ’cause implementing fixes on a website just wholesale can be a little problematic.

I don’t know if it’s problematic. It’s probably good. It’s probably a net positive, right? It’s actually not positive, or not problematic. It’s completely positive to turn all of our fixes on. But what we advocate is that you turn them on, and you let it scan the page so that you can ensure that those fixes are working.

And then in the right-hand column, we have import settings. Upload a JSON file to restore settings on this website. So there’s a file upload input here, and then the same check boxes for [01:04:00] import settings and import fixes.

So here’s an example. So I’m gonna leave both checked, and I’m gonna download this export.

Let me … I think I’ve got plenty of settings because I’ve been testing this. So I will download this, and then… Hold on. Let me pull this up real quick.

I’m not sharing my whole screen,

William: oh, so you need to get your IDE up to show. 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Hold on. Do you have one of these JSON files? 

William: I may have one. I’m just looking. 

Steve: So since I’ve already got your screen shared here 

William: I do not have one, but I guess I can grab one. No, I can’t, ’cause I don’t have Pro enabled.

Steve: Okay. Here, let me re-share my screen then. I will [01:05:00] share my whole screen here.

Oh, it won’t let me. Stop. All right. So I’m gonna share this whole screen here.

All right

So you can see here I have the JSON file. In the JSON file, you can see that we have settings, and then these are all the exported settings, and then we have fixes, and these are all the exported fixes. 

William: And I would say this is loosely human-readable. 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think any developer could probably go through here and, modify [01:06:00] this if they need to modify it without issue.

So I’ve exported that. If I go over to my settings… So let’s say that I go to a different website, which I’m not on a different website, but let’s, modify these settings so we can show that, all these millions of custom post types I have.

I will deselect one at a time.

William: A deselect all button there, right? 

Steve: Yeah. So I’m just deselecting all these to show that they will change, right? So if I hit save on that, and then if I go to fixes, I’m just gonna deselect all the fixes.

Look at all these wonderful fixes. 

William: You’ve got a horrible test site if you need all them. 

Steve: So if I go back to [01:07:00] import, export, and I let me go here. I’m just gonna drag and drop that import file, and I want to import both. But even though this file contains both settings and fixes, I can actually only import- Settings.

So I’m gonna deselect fixes, and then I’m gonna run an import, and then I get a success message. And then if I go over to settings, you can see these things are all selected again because I imported that. But my fixes are not selected because I did not import those. So if I now want to import my fixes with the same file, drag and drop that there, and then I’ll deselect settings ’cause I don’t wanna override my settings I just imported.

And I select import fixes, and I run the import. You can now see on the fixes I have all the fixes selected that were selected when I ran the initial import. 

William: Nice. For a single site, this might not save a lot of time, [01:08:00] but if you have 15, 20 sites, it’s gonna save you a lot of hours. 

Steve: So we do have we do have a way to manage settings like this in a multi-site, 

William: Yes.

Steve: In a network. So at the beginning of the livestream I mentioned that we have this multi-site add-on that you can use to manage your Accessibility Checker license key and stats throughout the whole network. And what it also does is it allows you to select a… So you set up one site, and it allows you to select that site, and it allows you to take those settings from that one site and duplicate it on all the other sites.

So that is a way to do it in a multi-site, but there’s not a way to do it not in a multi-site. And- 

William: Yep … 

Steve: what we do here at Equalize Digital is sometimes we get enterprise clients that have a large number of websites, and they engage with us to do what we call our white glove onboard. And that’s where we will actually go through all of their websites, [01:09:00] and we will onboard Accessibility Checker onto those sites, set up the desired settings that we’ve determined with the client, and we will white glove set it all up for them on all of their websites, run an initial scan so that they have everything up and running, configured, and scanned all in one fell swoop.

William: Ready to fix issues. 

Steve: Yep. And what the import-export does is it… This is one of those times where it’s like, it’d be really nice for us to have this. In software sometimes if it’s nice for us to have it, it’s probably nice for everybody else to have it too, right? 

William: Yep. 

Steve: So this is a little bit of helping us do something, but it also helps you do it as well too, 

William: yeah. We have quite a number of users that are agency clients. They have 25 sites. We save them a few minutes every single site. That’s- 

Steve: Yeah … 

William: it’s worth doing. And it turns out it wasn’t that complicated to build this, right? 

Steve: No, not at all. That is all of the features. That’s it. It’s just a [01:10:00] massive release this last month.

We’ve been busy. This coming month, we’re busy already. We’re already working on new features, which we teased already here in this live stream, and we look forward to jumping on again and talking about those new things when they’re ready here in a few weeks, and or here in a couple weeks. And and we hope that you join us, and we hope that you watch after the fact.

Thanks for joining. If you use Accessibility Checker, do us a solid, give it a review preferably a five-star review on WordPress.org and- But if you 

William: give us a four-star review, I will find and fix your problem, so bear that in mind as well. 

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. We totally will. 

William: Don- don’t give me a one star.

Steve: We, we will stop at nothing to resolve your issue. We will earn that extra star. Yep. So well, I think that concludes our live stream for today. Thanks William, for joining, and thanks for all your hard work on Accessibility Checker over the last month, and look forward to doing this again. 

William: I’ll have more light next time maybe.

Steve: Yeah. [01:11:00] It’s all right. Cool. All right. Take care. See ya

Email Reports Are Now Available

One of the biggest additions in this release is the new Accessibility Reports feature. This allows users to receive weekly email summaries about the accessibility status of their websites.

This feature took much longer to build than expected because it required creating a secure connection between the Accessibility Checker plugin and the my.equalizedigital.com dashboard. For free users, especially, there was a major technical hurdle: they previously did not have license keys. Since email reports require authentication and secure data transmission, we needed a way to generate secure keys for free users as well.

How Email Reports Work for Free Users

In version 1.40.0, free users now have access to email reports via a new Accessibility Reports tab in the plugin settings.

To activate reports:

  1. Install Accessibility Checker.
  2. Create a free account on my.equalizedigital.com.
  3. Generate a free license key.
  4. Paste the key into the Accessibility Reports settings panel.
  5. Enable reports.

Once connected, users receive weekly accessibility summary emails every Monday.

The free email reports include:

  • Total issues found across the website.
  • Historical comparison data from the previous week.
  • Total URLs scanned.
  • Coverage information for scanned content.
  • Post types flagged to be scanned.
  • Upgrade prompts for more advanced reporting.

These reports help users identify whether accessibility issues are increasing or decreasing over time, even if they are only scanning one page at a time inside WordPress.

The historical comparison was one of the most important additions because it gives users a much better understanding of overall accessibility trends across their sites.

Email Reports for Pro Users

Accessibility Checker Pro users receive expanded reporting with significantly more detail.

The Pro email reports include:

  • Total issue counts
  • Need Review counts
  • Accessibility pass percentages
  • Full coverage statistics
  • Most problematic pages
  • Most severe issues grouped by count and severity
  • Direct links to affected pages
  • Links directly to open issues in WordPress

Users can quickly identify the biggest bang for their buck accessibility fixes by reviewing which issue types appear most frequently across the website.

For example, if color contrast issues occur hundreds of times across the site, fixing a single global styling issue could dramatically reduce accessibility errors sitewide.

Recipient Management and Future Plans

Currently, email reports are sent only to the owner of the associated license key.

Adding multiple recipients turned out to be more complex than expected due to CAN-SPAM compliance requirements, opt-in flows, and per-user unsubscribe handling.

We also teased future plans for:

  • Multiple email recipients.
  • Double opt-in workflows.
  • Per-user unsubscribe controls.
  • Aggregated accessibility dashboards.
  • Historical accessibility trend tracking across multiple websites.

Screen Reader Only Text Format for the Block Editor

Another major addition in this release is a new Screen Reader Only text format built directly into the WordPress Block Editor.

This feature allows users to add screen-reader-only text without manually editing HTML.

During the livestream, we demoed a common accessibility scenario using ambiguous links like “Learn More.” For sighted users, short link text may visually make sense within surrounding content. But for screen reader users navigating through links independently, “Learn More” provides no context.

Using the new formatter, users can:

  • Highlight text
  • Open the text formatting menu
  • Select “Screen Reader Only”
  • Hide supplemental descriptive text visually while preserving it for screen readers

We demoed how a link or button could visually display “Learn More” while screen readers would announce “Learn More About Screen Reader Text.”

Visual Editing Controls

To make the experience easier for content creators, we added a visual editing system inside the editor.

Screen-reader-only text:

  • Appears highlighted while editing.
  • Includes tooltips for identification.
  • Can be toggled visible or hidden during editing.
  • Remains editable even when hidden globally.

We also added a setting called “Always Show Screen Reader Text,” allowing users to keep screen-reader-only content visible while editing if desired.

Full Site Editor Support

The formatter works inside the Full Site Editor (FSE). This means users can add screen-reader-only text directly inside templates and reusable site components without touching code.

Previously, these kinds of accessibility enhancements often required custom HTML or developer assistance. Now, content editors can implement them directly within WordPress editing workflows.

Front-End Highlighter UI Update

We also introduced a completely redesigned Front-End Highlighter interface.

The Front-End Highlighter was originally developed during our work on NASA’s website redesign project and has been part of Accessibility Checker for several years.

With this release, we modernized the interface to better align with recent Accessibility Checker UI improvements.

Unified Panel Design

The old multi-panel layout has been replaced with a cleaner unified panel design.

The updated interface now includes:

  • Issue titles
  • Severity labels
  • Problem vs. Needs Review badges
  • WCAG guideline links
  • Explanations
  • Affected code toggles
  • Pagination controls
  • Action menus

We also moved many controls into a new ellipses action menu to reduce interface clutter.

New Front-End Highlighter Actions

The updated highlighter includes several improved controls:

  • Disable styles
  • Re-enable styles
  • Rescan page
  • Clear issues
  • Move panel left/right
  • Dock panel
  • Reset position

During the livestream, we demoed how disabling styles can expose hidden accessibility issues inside mobile menus and hidden navigation systems.

We also demoed how users can now drag the panel around the screen or dock it to either side of the browser window for better workflows while auditing pages.

Persistent Explanations and Fixes

The new highlighter also keeps explanation and code panels open while navigating between issues.

This makes remediation workflows much faster because users no longer need to repeatedly reopen panels while reviewing multiple issues.

During the demo, we also showed one-click fixes directly inside the highlighter for supported automated remediations like removing incorrect tabindex values.

Upcoming Front-End Highlighter Features

We also previewed several upcoming Front-End Highlighter features currently in development.

These include:

  • Headings maps
  • Landmark maps
  • Visual tab order overlays

Headings Map

The headings map displays the heading structure of the page and visually identifies skipped heading levels.

During the demo, we showed how incorrect heading structures are highlighted visually, making it easier to identify semantic hierarchy problems.

Landmark Viewer

The landmarks tab surfaces page landmarks and their accessible labels.

This allows users to review how assistive technologies interpret navigation regions and page structure.

Tab Order Visualization

The tab order view overlays the keyboard focus order directly onto the page.

This visualization helps users identify:

  • Incorrect tabindex usage
  • Unexpected keyboard focus jumps
  • Poor keyboard navigation experiences

Import and Export Settings as JSON

Accessibility Checker Pro 1.22.0 also introduces a new Import/Export settings tool.

This feature allows users to export Accessibility Checker settings and fixes as JSON files and import them into other websites.

What Can Be Exported

Users can export:

  • Plugin settings
  • Accessibility fixes
  • Or both together

The JSON export is developer-friendly containing structured settings and fixes while excluding sensitive information like:

  • License keys
  • Email report tokens
  • Security credentials

Faster Cross-Site Configuration

This feature is especially useful for agencies and teams managing multiple websites that are not inside a multisite install. Multisite settings cloning was already possible, now it’s possible to export and import sites across non-multisite installations.

Users can:

  1. Configure one website
  2. Export settings
  3. Import them into another site
  4. Selectively import only settings or only fixes

This dramatically reduces repetitive setup work across multiple installations.

Minor Fixes Included in This Release

In addition to the larger features, we also shipped several smaller improvements and bug fixes.

Modifier Class for File Size and Type Output

We added a modifier class that suppresses visible file size and type text when necessary while preserving accessibility information for screen readers.

This helps prevent layout breakage while maintaining accessible labeling.

Improved Full Site Scan Failure Handling

Full site scans now properly fail invalid scan URLs instead of repeatedly attempting to scan pages the user running the scan is unable to edit due to permission settings.

More Reliable Pro License Recovery

Pro license checks can now recover automatically during periodic rechecks if temporary network failures occur.

This reduces cases where users previously needed to manually re-enter license keys.

Faster Orphaned Issue Cleanup

Orphaned issue cleanup now runs twice daily instead of once daily. Up to 50 per cleanup meaning as many as 100 per day.

This improves stale issue cleanup speed, especially for websites with large content migrations.

Smarter Table Header Detection

We also improved missing table header detection.

The rule now:

  • Correctly skips tables using role="presentation" or role="none".
  • Better handles colspan and rowspan relationships.
  • Better recognizes ARIA header relationships.

These improvements reduce false positives and improve table accessibility scanning accuracy.

A Massive Release Across the Board

This release introduced major improvements across Accessibility Checker, including:

  • Weekly accessibility email reporting.
  • A redesigned Front-End Highlighter.
  • New block editor accessibility formatting tools.
  • Import/export configuration management.
  • Improved accessibility rule handling.
  • Better scan reliability and cleanup workflows.

These updates are about making accessibility workflows easier, faster, and more scalable for both individual website owners and agencies managing many websites.

Join Us for the Next Livestream

The Accessibility Checker Changelog livestream airs on the fourth Thursdays of the month. Each episode will feature demos, technical deep dives, and previews of new features. Follow us on YouTube to get notified when we go live.

To learn more, download Accessibility Checker or upgrade to Pro.

If you have feedback or questions, you can connect with Steve Jones on X or join our Facebook group.

We look forward to sharing more soon in the next changelog.

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Filed Under: Product News

About Steve Jones

Steve Jones is the CTO of Equalize Digital, Inc., a company specializing in WordPress accessibility and maker of the Accessibility Checker plugin.

Steve has more than fifteen years of experience developing highly custom WordPress websites and applications for clients in the enterprise business, higher ed, and government sectors. He specializes in bridging the gap between design and development by approaching development projects with a keen eye for design, user experience, and accessibility.

Follow Steve on Twitter · Find Steve on LinkedIn

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