Changelog 017: Issues Explorer Rescans and Better Builder Support

[00:00:00] Introduction

Steve: This is the Accessibility Checker Changelog livestream, where we talk about the latest changes in the Accessibility Checker plugin, and that has actually grown to be more than just the suite of Accessibility Checker plugins, but we also have some newer plugins as well that we will discuss.

Accessibility Checker is an automated accessibility scanning plugin to help your website become and stay accessible.

We have a free full-featured plugin called Accessibility Checker that you can get from EqualizeDigital.com or from the WordPress plugin repository. And we have a premium plugin that goes along with that to give you more advanced and pro-level agency features and tools called Accessibility Checker Pro.

And we have a few add-ons, audit, one called Audit History that allows you to track your accessibility over time with nice charts, and exports.

And we have a multi-site plugin that helps you, manage your, Accessibility Checker licenses permissions, and stats across the multi-site network.

And we have our Exporter add-on that allows you to export all your accessibility data to CSV files.

We also have a couple other plugins in our accessibility family of plugins, one called ArchiveWP that allows youto facilitating the properly archiving your website content.

And we have a newer plugin that we spoke about in a previous livestream called BoardScribe that allows you to make accessible meeting minute, agenda tables.

Today we are talking about Issue Explorer rescans and Better Builder Support.

Better Builder Support is a reference to Page Builders. We have found that a lot of our users actually do utilize Page Builders quite a bit and quite extensively, so we have put in some effort to help to start the process of integrating Accessibility Checker into these Page Builders, a little more deeply.

Cool. So William, we ready to jump into this? This is gonna be a… not a one big feature episode, but a bunch of little things episode.

William: Yeah. So I’m still installing BoardScribe so-

Steve: Yeah…

William: We can look at the-

Steve: BoardScribe’s gonna be the last thing we talk about … highlights. Yeah. Cool.

William: So yeah- So- … which one to start?

[00:03:02] Accessibility Checker Pro Issues Explorer Improvements

Steve: Let’s start with Accessibility Checker Pro and the Issues Explorer improvements.

I think it was two or three, livestreams back, we talked about our new Issues Explorer, which was taking all of our kind of older table pages, like our Fast Track and our Open Issues and our Ignore Log, and consolidating them into one unified application that we are now calling the Issues Explorer.

And we have continued to refine the Issues Explorer since its release, and with this, these latest releases, we’ve added a couple things, most notably the Rescan feature.

So William, do you want me to pull up your screen and-

William: Yeah, give me one second. I have a license key up.

Steve: Oh, okay.

William: Oh, there we go.

Steve: All right. We don’t want to expose the license key to the world, ’cause then we gotta go delete it.

William: But actually, remember that we masked the key now.

Steve: Yeah.

William: So that’s good.

Steve: There you go. All right. You ready?

William: Yep.

Steve: All right, let me pull your screen up.

William: Yeah. This is the new Issue Explorer page. This is a fresh test site I’ve just built, so the rescan is still going. But there’s 183 issues on this site. None are dismissed. I guess the first feature to talk about that we haven’t touched on before is the new Image Column that’s available here. We can t.oggle this on and on. Unfortunately, none of the test issues I just seeded have an image, so

Steve: Well-

William: I don’t think I can show that, but…

Oh, there’s one.

Steve: If you switch…

Yeah, switch to a… Go to the filters and switch to a rule that pertains to images, like missing alt text or something.

William: This one.

There we go. So this new column here, Image, it’s a small thumbnail. These are not the most, inventive of images. But these are images that are missing alt text on this test site. So now you can t.oggle that column on or off, no page reload required if I were to click in, there’s a bigger version of the image. It’s just blue background. It’s an orange or red background.

Yeah. So nice and easy. In the Display options then opens this t.oggle where we can t.oggle the Image column on or off.

Steve: So by default, since this wasn’t-

William: By default it is off.

Steve: It is off by default, yeah.

William: And that’s just to prevent any weird sizing going on in these columns.

Steve: Yeah, totally. So I can switch to mine real quick so you can see actual-

William: Yeah.

Steve: Actual images … actual images that look like something. In the Display settings I t.oggled on Image, and if you open the panel, you get the image as well, right?

William: Yes. That has always been a feature inside the…

If you open the, I guess you call this the drawer. Yeah. The image has always been visible there, but you… It was previously not a column in the main display.

Steve: Cool. So that’s a small feature that helps just give you a little bit more context to where the image or where the issue is and what image it pertains to.

This was actually, this was a feature we had before in our old issues log, and we removed it to kinda save space in the table, and then through user-

William: Also because we thought no one ever relied on it, but turns out-

Steve: Yeah.

William: …that was a mistake.

Steve: Yep. So we quickly had some users ask, “Why can’t I see the image?”

So we’re like, “We need to bring that back.”

The next feature I think is probably, a little bit more of a, an exciting feature, and it’s actually something we’re bringing new into the Issues Explorer, where we did not have something like this before in the old Open Issues, and Fast Track pages that we have since deprecated, and that is Rescans.

Before you would make changes, and then you would have to, you’d have to go do a Full-site scan or go to the page and rescan the… you’d have to go to the Edit page and Rescan the page. And what we’re trying to do with the Issues Explorer is we’re trying to make it like the one-stop shop where you can do everything you need to do to remediate your website in one place.

So the first step in that was bringing in rescanning, and this is per issue rescanning. Actually, it’s per page, but, you initiate it per issue, but-

William: Correct.

Steve: So you wanna walk us through rescanning a little bit?

William: Yep. So if you put my screen back up, so if we were to pick any of these… any, any one of these issues, if you look at any issue, and then the drawer opens, and in the sidebar of the drawer we have three buttons, the View on page, Edit page, those existed previously, but at the top we have this new Rescan page button. This is present on any one of the issues in the Issue Explorer. So if I were to click on this button, it changes to rescanning, and then there’s a notice up at the top of this page. Now, this does get announced to screen readers, but it says, “Rescan complete. No changes to this page’s issues.” And that is correct. None of the issues on this page have changed.

Now let me just ask my AI if it can fix some issues on this page and see if it’s quick enough, and we can try again. So I’ve clicked it again. Still no issues changed. I have my fingers crossed that it can fix some of these pretty quickly.

Oh, and I didn’t go YOLO mode, so it’s now making me confirm every issue.

Steve: So what you’re doing is you’re actually fixing-

William: Yeah, I’m fixing these issues in the background, and it will fix these through WP-CLI, so this would not be the typical path people would follow. But this is the best way for me to actually showcase.

Steve: Right, because if you actually go into the editor and remediate it straight from the editor, it’s gonna re-scan when you save, right?

William: Immediately. So you would not get to this page. So this is a good synonym for if someone fixes an issue in their theme or a plugin updates, and it’s a globalized fix that appears on multiple pages.

Let me try clicking Rescan again now. So now the notice says, “Rescan completed. 5 resolved. The issue list has been updated.” And in the background those issues are gone. You… It is an error, so it won’t get noticed through the screen reader, but if we can see, these issues’ numbers have changed.

And yeah, five issues have been resolved. Not this issue that I was looking at specifically, but other issues are now gone from this page.

And you can just close that notice. So I click the button again, nothing should have changed.

Steve: But if you fix this issue specifically-

William: So I cannot fix this issue specifically because it is a theme problem.

Steve: Oh.

William: We would have to fix the theme.

Steve: Edit the theme?

It’s not in the content?

William: No, I don’t think so. Improper Use of Link, so it is the navigation. But let’s take advantage of the View on page.

Yeah.

Steve: Oh, it’s in a widget.

William: Or something in the menu.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Also, I don’t know if we ever talked about that, but now you can actually just drag this front-end-highlighter around. Just click in the title, move it to where you want.

Steve: Cool.

William: Oh, actually I need to move it because…

Steve: Because, yeah.

William: Our heads are in the way.

Steve: Our heads are in the way. Yeah. Totally. Cool.

So we could spoof a fix by deactivating the plugin, fixing it in the content, and then re-scanning it. But the real use case here is if you, fix some code.

William: Correct.

Steve: And it allows you to re-scan one at a time.

If it resolves the issue, in the Issue Explorer it actually tells you that it’s resolved, but it leaves that state until you leave that modal, right?

William: Correct. So the modal doesn’t, it never goes away as such. The modal will… Or the drawer component will always be present, even if the issue has gone away.

And I think I did fix that. Let me just save. I can demo that now. So if I were to click Rescan Page now, feasibly this issue will go away because I removed the Twitter, the broken Twitter link from the demo content. Yeah. So now this issue has gone away. It says, “Rescan complete. 9 issues resolved and 10 new issues were found.”

Because I saved the page, but this issue was resolved and removed from the Open Issues list. So this is still visible, the sidebar until you close it, it will remain here in case you needed this page for something.

Steve: Yeah. So that is the Rescan. now we are looking at expanding this here in the near future too.

Do you wanna talk about that?

William: Yes. So if, for example, you know you have fixed all of these Improper Use of Link on this page or across several pages, you should be able to just bulk select these and where our bulk actions are currently, we can only dismiss the selected issues or clear the selection. There would be another option here to rescan all the pages where these issues appear. Now, this is a bad example because all of these issues are on the support page, but you could pick any number of pages with the bulk action check boxes in the side and be able to rescan it here, and it would show you progress of each page as it scans, and once that completes, would give you a summary of how many new issues were found, how many issues went away, or ideally all of the issues would go away and then the content would reload and you would be told.

Steve: Yep. So we’re just trying to give you… We’re trying to take the first step into bringing our Full site scanner into the Issues Explorer and being able to utilize the Rescanning feature at the issue level.

And, so we now have it at the individual issue. We are looking to expand it to the bulk action here in the near future. That prevents a little bit of a UI, a lot of UI states to handle because we’re actually gonna show you a status of every page as it scans, like William says. Look for that here in the near future.

All right. So before we move on, while we’re still on Accessibility Checker Pro, let’s walk through the next thing, William, here, which was fixing duplicate file size and type labels with Page Builders like Oxygen apply content filters more than once. So we could just talk about this. There’s not really much to show.

William: Yeah. So in the background we have a fix called fix file type or apply file size and type labels to external links or any kind of file that is not part of the content you’re reading, and that adds a link, or adds the size and the type of file to the links.

In some cases, Oxygen Builder specifically, sometimes they were applying the filter several times, running through their content, if any of the developers are listening in, several times, which was resulting in several copies of that being processed per link.

We added a fix to that so that any existing size and type that lives on a link will be detected if it was applied by our fix and it will just skip adding the duplicates. It will only be output one time only across any of them that we have applied it to.

And there is filters to control this. We have developer documents that list the filters where if you have content that it doesn’t get applied to, you can add it there. So yeah, I’ll-

Steve: Yeah.

William: Yeah.

Steve: So that’s just another step that we’ve taken to improve our builder support and ’cause we’ve been working a lot with audit and remediation clients where they’re using things like Elementor or Oxygen or Divi. So we’re doing a lot inside the plugin to help facilitate those builder tools.

[00:17:12] Accessibility Checker Free Improvements

Steve: With that said, let’s move on to Elementor. This would be in Accessibility Checker Free.

William: Correct.

Steve: These fixes, I think these came in the recent version that came out yesterday in 1.50.0.

[00:17:33] Elementor Highlighter Improvements

William: Correct.

Steve: Elementor highlighter improvements. What did we do?

William: Yeah, so the main one is that if you were to save this page right now, it will actually trigger the rescan right away. Previously, you would have to manually rescan a page in Elementor as you were making changes. Now, whenever you click the save, or in this case the Publish button, actually just perform the rescan right there live in the editor so… it works how you would expect.

Previously, I guess it did not work how it would’ve been expected. You would’ve had to manually re-scan the page after saving it. Now it just scans.

Steve: Yeah, we’ve, hooked it directly up to Elementor’s save process, right?

William: Exactly. So whenever I click this button, it’s re-scanned, it’s highlighted all the issues on the page.

Now, if we were to, let’s just add a new element here, and in here I will put an HTML block.

There-

Steve: You got it…

William: Here’s on the sidebar.

Steve: Yeah.

William: And the left sidebar, it’s now got an HTML box, and I’m just gonna put a a bad link in the sidebar or an empty link, and I’ll just call it Bad link. So now I have this bad link. It is an anchor tag with a pound sign. Doesn’t go anywhere, doesn’t have any anchor afterwards, so I’ve added that right here in this HTML block I’ve added.

If I were to click Publish here, it has now detected this bad link. And Improper Use of Link, sorry. Not a bad link.

Steve: Yeah.

William: So this is the issue here.

Steve: Yeah. So you can, page forward and backwards through issues just like you would on the front end.

William: A will call out actually, that when you enter an Elementor panel, it does clear ’em away, and if I were to try and page through these, it says, “Element is not visible.” And so you need to actually save for them to become revisible again, and that is something we actually can’t work around because Elementor rebuilds this link every time you visit the editor for it.

Steve: Yeah. So you save, you get your issues, all the targets are there. You can kinda see what the problem is, but once you start to interact with Elementor-

William: Yeah, we don’t know whether it’s still an issue at that point.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, so we kinda clear the state, and plus, that kinda gets Accessibility Checker out of the way of Elementor when they wanna be editing.

William: Exactly.

Steve: Yeah.

All right, so we did have a little fix here. We found a little bug with some links.

William: Yeah, so this is a link, and it… But I can’t click on this link in Elementor, which is on purpose.

Elementor blocks any link clicks from being able to navigate away, which is a problem for us because in our front-end highlighter, we link to the WCAG criteria, and also the detailed documentation on our website. But previously, if you were to click on this link, it wouldn’t do anything at all.

Elementor would block it. So now if I were to click on this more detailed documentation link, it opens in a new tab. This is the documentation for that issue. So we corrected that behavior. That has probably been non-functional for some time.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah, so just making Accessibility Checker and Elementor work more seamlessly together.

William: Yeah. And for the more developer-minded here, it was a very interesting experience where when we got this to rescan when you click Publish, it would discover issues in this top toolbar from Elementor. It would also discover issues in this left sidebar from Elementor. That was an interesting technical solve to not scan all these potentially problematic boxes.

Steve: Yeah. Very interesting fix from the dev side, and we are happy to get this out to the users, and they can seamlessly use Accessibility Checker re-scans.

So that’s not all we did to help integrate with Elementor a little bit more, and other Page Builders as well.

We did some more hardening around style leaking into our own highlighter panel.

Elementor themes seem to want to really be pervasive and leak and conflict with our own styling in our highlighter. So we’ve gone through and we’ve upped the priority on some of our own styles to make sure that the highlighter panel itself is not being styled by Elementor.

William: Yeah, so these buttons, the previous and the next buttons were specifically captured frequently in Elementor sites that have the Elementor site kit enabled or theme kit, where these buttons would have been overwritten into… potentially look broken in a lot of themes.

Steve: So up the priority there, make things look like how they’re supposed to look like.

And then the final thing that we’ve done is, this was in a few versions back in 1.47.0, is we added a bit of a contrast fix to our highlighter outline. I think this actually came with some of our own internal accessibility testing of our plugin, because we don’t just make a plugin that helps you check accessibility. We try to make Accessibility Checker actually accessible itself.

William: Correct.

And I do have up on, I had to set a red background on this section where I put the bad link previously in Elementor. So if you can, were to look closely at this, you can see our, I think it’s the magenta dotted border around it, and behind that is white.

So therein we have contrast between the magenta and the white of, I believe, 7.1.

Steve: Yeah. Maybe

William: It may be slightly more than that.

Steve: Yeah.

William: But it is at least contrasting between the magenta and the white color, and previously it would just have been the magenta border around that. And this passes on dark backgrounds. The magenta color itself passes on light, so now we cover both situations here.

Steve: Are you able to zoom in?

William: Oh, okay. Probably can zoom. Yeah, I can zoom and I can drag this over the white.

Steve: So basically there’s, there’s no chance that there would be a color contrast issue any longer.

William: Correct. So the magenta will always pass on white, the white will always pass on dark.

And because the contrast between these two is at least 3:1, but I believe it is as high as 7:1, they will always contrast each other regardless of what the background is.

Steve: This is our own kinda mimic of how native browser outlines work. They have the blue and the white outline, they have both. That way, if the blue contrast actually fails, the white will pass. So there’s almost no scenario where your outline would fail color contrast, and we’ve done a similar approach here.

William: Yep. Now, this can never… they contrast against each other sufficiently, so regardless of what background you have, you will be able to see this.

So this magenta color probably wouldn’t be a good contrast against the red, that effect here, but doesn’t matter because we have the white border and it is, I believe, one pixel on either side, but in total I think it’s about eight pixels.

Steve: Yeah. Very visible.

William: Yep.

Steve: Those are some of the Elementor and builder improvements that we’ve made into Accessibility Checker Free, and we are happy to be working more seamlessly with Elementor.

[00:26:26] Simplified Summary

Steve: Jumping back, I believe this is a free feature as well here… If you’ve ever used our Simplified Summary feature, which is a way for you to… If your post is over a certain reading level with, I think it’s ninth grade reading level, which Accessibility Checker runs the evaluation and will tell you whether or not it’s over or under, and if it requires a Simplified Summary. We have a field where you can actually summarize the post at a lower reading grade level, and actually scan that summary as well to make sure that it’s under the right reading grade level. And then we have settings so you can output that either before or after the content, right?

William: Correct.

Steve: And I actually think we had a function that you could put in the page to output it as well.

William: We still have the function. You can and choose to insert this manually.

Steve: But what we’ve done is we’ve gone a little bit further, and we’ve created it at a new block and a shortcode to help facilitate the output of your Simplified Summary.

William: Yes. And just so people are aware, so I’ve came to our Settings page, and the Prompt for Simplified Summary saying I have set to be Always, because on this site, most of the content is fairly simple. It would not require a Simplified Summary. So for the purposes of a demo, I’ve set this to Always be required.

If I come to the post page and I just pick, click Add new post, I’ll give it a name of Test Post and then come into the block picker, type forward slash, and start typing in Simplified Summary. The block appears. Now I have inserted the Simplified Summary block, and you cannot edit this block in line itself. The edit actually is in our own sidebar in the Readability Analysis tab where the Simplified Summary box is. So this is the standard place where you would type your Simplified Summary, but you can insert it wherever you choose on the page with the block. And there is a shortcode equivalent as well if you’re not using the block either.

So if I were to put test summary into this, click save, then-

Steve: Publish…

William: Publish. And visit this post in our browser. Here is the summary. This is where it appears and I didn’t put any test content, so yeah, it’s empty, but.

Steve: Yeah. And the shortcode works exactly the same way, but can we talk about the title a little bit?

William: Yeah, so the title here, you cannot edit in the block nor in our sidebar. If you have Pro-

Steve: Yeah.

William: In the Settings page, you can modify the heading here. So this heading is one place to modify only. It will be the same across all of your Simplified Summary blocks, and that’s just good for cognitive recognition. And we have this as a translated string. If you have the default, then this will translate to whatever language your site is in out of the 30 or so languages we have. But yeah, it’s one place only to modify it, and as I said, for recognition purposes it will always be the same regardless of what post you put this on.

Steve: And you need the Pro plugin to actually to be able to change it.

William: To change it, is in the Pro plugin, but in Free it will always say Simplified Summary. And it does output, if I pull over, it’s an H2 tag, which is suitable for internal content in almost all situations.

Steve: Yeah. I’d have to check the docs, but I do think that title might be filterable to change.

William: It is filterable if you know what you’re touching.

Steve: Yeah.

William: So yeah, you can filter this if you are a developer. No need to have Pro, but I would say buy Pro anyway, ’cause there’s other features.

Steve: It’s actually always been that way.

William: Correct.

Steve: Since the onset of Accessibility Checker, nearly six years ago, so it’s not a new, a premium gate, that upgrade feature.

So that is the Simplified Summary block. I think that’s all on that, right?

William: That is it. It is fairly simple. Insert it where you want, the summary will output. There will be Simplified Summary header. People will be able to find this wherever they choose.

Steve: And you can do this in your FSE themes, your full-site editing themes.

So if you have a template file, you can put it there, and then it’ll work on every, every single-

William: And if you don’t have FSE available, you can put that shortcode wherever you choose as well. Put it inside content, put it outside content. Wherever you want, it to appear.

Steve: Wherever you want.

Cool.

William: It’s most common for people to want after the content or before the content though.

Steve: Yeah, and the block is smart. The block is aware of other outputs of the Simplified Summary and will prevent duplication, right?

William: Correct. It will. So if I were to go here and then insert before and after the Simplified Summary, I Insert after. Save this page. So the content is before the Simplified Summary block, and then after. If I revisit the page on the front end, you will see that is the order the content lives in. Before Simplified Summary, after. If I were to come in here and remove this block, save it, and then reload this other page on the front end, you will see the Simplified Summary appears after all of the content.

So it says before, after, those are the content of the post, and then the Simplified Summary appears afterwards because that is what is configured in my Accessibility Checker settings. However, if you place this block anywhere else, it knows and it won’t output twice. It will output wherever you choose.

Steve: Yeah. So if you have a default like after the content and then you have one post that you’re like, “I really don’t want that down there, I want it like right in the middle of my post,” you can put it in the middle of your post and you can rest assured that the plugin will pick up on that and not output the Simplified Summary again at the end.

William: Exactly. So it will never duplicate the block placement or the shortcode placement, or if you’re using codes, the code-based placement will always take priority over wherever the default is. If it doesn’t detect one of those three, default WP block issues.

Steve: Very cool. And that is the new Simplified Summary block and shortcode that came with Accessibility Checker Free version 1.49.0.

[00:33:49] Scanner Accuracy

Steve: I think next we can kinda talk through, I don’t know that we have to show a lot unless we hit something that you think we should show. Let me put our-

William: I didn’t set up all of these, so…

Steve: Let me put our big beautiful faces back up on the screen. But, so Scanner Accuracy. So this is an ongoing thing.

If you’ve joined our livestreams before, then you know that we are always constantly refining our scanning rules, and that we don’t just, we don’t just inject Axe-core rule set wholesale. We actually use some Axe-core, and we use a whole bunch of our own stuff, our own rules that we are constantly improving and constantly making better.

Let’s run through it. Let’s kinda like just rapid fire some of these, William. Let’s start with…

William: Yep. So the 1×1 tracking pixels are common on… almost all websites these days, Facebook Pixel, YouTube trackers, all kinds of marketing pixels are 1×1 tracking pixels. They are actual pixels by definition, and they’re images that lack alt text. But they are generally invisible from screen readers, and as such, we actually skip 1×1 tracking pixels now in our scanner. They will no longer get flagged regardless of how you add them. Previously, we had some handling specifically for Google Tag Manager, but now none of them will track. If it is genuinely a 1×1 image as a tracking pixel, it just will be skipped in the scanner. Screen reader won’t access it. We shouldn’t flag it as a problem.

Steve: There you go. And that is available as of version 1.47.0 of Free.

William: That was like, two months ago.

Steve: Yeah. So it’s been out for a little while.

William: The next one on our list here is .ogg files.

So .ogg is capable of containing video or audio, but it is very uncommon to be used for actual video files. It’s almost exclusively been used for audio forever. It just is capable of containing frames as well.

Previously because it was capable of containing video frames, we would flag it as video is present. Now, we actually just, we skip over that. If the .ogg file is just audio, won’t be flagged as a video. That’s no longer false flagged, and it is perfectly fine to include .ogg files on your page.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

William: Go ahead and do that. It won’t cause noise anymore.

And in addition to video changes, we did actually improve the video detection further.

Images that contain the name “YouTube” or “Vimeo” in them also would false flag as videos due to our regular expression source matching. That no longer will be the case. You can name your video or your image whatever you want. It won’t be misclassified as a video anymore.

Steve: Yeah. The next one’s an interesting one, and one that we’ve been chasing for some time, and this is actually Query Monitor.

Query Monitor outputs a lot of its own markup on the page, and we thought that we had adequately excluded all of its markup, but we found some edge cases recently.

William: I actually think they’ve recently changed their containers to be more accessible. The way we excluded these before was by class name or ID, which is a core part of Axe-core itself. You can exclude or include any CSS classes, identifiers of any kind. And we had excluded Query Monitor because it’s a developer only tool, and generally not visible unless you have chosen to install the plugin and also clicked to open it. So we were excluding that from our scans because you don’t want that information. Visitors to your site are never gonna see it. They changed their containers for accessibility reasons, but unfortunately that meant that our exclusions match didn’t hit anymore. So we’ve updated our exclusion matches. If you have an old version or a later version of Query Monitor, it should not be in your scans at all.

Steve: Yep. So just trying to clean up some of the noise and make sure that we’re only surfacing things you really need to pay attention to.

William: And that’s exactly the same thing we just did with the Elementor frame. when you’re scanning an Elementor page, your customers or visitors to your site aren’t gonna see that, so there is no point in us scanning that. Same reason behind Query Monitor.

Steve: And improved aria-hidden handling for core blocks.

William: Yeah, so some core blocks output aria-hidden by default. The spacer block comes to mind. I think also some of the backgrounds of cover blocks.

Anytime we encountered aria-hidden we would generally flag it as outside of the spacer block and a few other known valid use cases.

We’ve added more core blocks to that list of the valid use cases for aria-hidden, so you will no longer have to manually ignore that issue or, dismiss it. We will automatically just skip over it. We know that’s a valid use and we won’t create that noise.

Steve: Yep. And Unicode-aware, not unicorn aware, Unicode-aware ambiguous text detection.

William: This was an interesting one because this is not something that I would have ever came across in my day-to-day use of the internet. I don’t have Unicode ambiguous text on any of the sites that I’m testing, but some people do. Ambiguous text can be in all kinds of different languages. Some of them are not represented by ASCII. Previously, we would only match ASCII ambiguous text. Now, it doesn’t matter what character set you’re using, we will do our best to detect whether it’s ambiguous or not based on the content of the anchor and its surround.

Steve: Yeah, so that’s if you have, the little tilde above a-

William: Yes.

A tilde or any of the Chinese characters maybe, Cyrillic.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Anything that isn’t just the 128 characters of the ASCII alphabet. Which is most of the world.

Steve: So just some improvements there, and I actually do think that actually did come from a user, right?

William: It did.

Exactly. Yeah. So this was a, a user genuinely faced this problem, and we were unaware of it in our general use, so we fixed that and we have test suite now that verifies that’s gonna hopefully always be fixed for anyone who’s in non-English or even someone who just uses symbols in their content.

[00:41:08] New Window Warning

Steve: Along with fixing kind of our, for our file size and file type rendering to make sure that it is, one, being output in dynamic content, and two, not being output multiple times in content, we’ve done similar things for our New Window Warnings rule as well.

William: Yes. We have this as a fix inside Accessibility Checker free, and we also have a dedicated New Window Warning plugin, Accessibility in New Window Warnings.

They both use the same base code and apply these fixes the same way. We will talk about BoardScribe in a second, which is one of our new plugins where this fix applies, but Gravity Forms is probably the biggest one. If you use AJAX forms in Gravity Forms and you have multi-page forms, your second page would never have the New Window Warning applied because we parse the page at render time and apply our New Window Warning fix there.

If you were to change your Gravity Forms to page two of that form in a multi-part form, it wouldn’t trigger again. So now we actually will trigger on Gravity Forms re-render for AJAX forms. Also in BoardScribe re-renders, which we’ll show in a minute. And, we were already doing this for FacetWP, and yeah, now there is… for a developer, there is actually now a callable method if you’re building a system that will re-render after the page loads. You will be able to just trigger this New Window Warning on them whenever you do your own re-render.

Steve: Yep. So just another way we’re expanding support of Accessibility Checker into builders, into Gravity Forms. We already do it for FacetWP. We do it for our own plugins. So we’re just trying to make sure that Accessibility Checker plays well with others.

William: And it is becoming far more common now where what the state of the page is at load time is not the state of the page as people interact with it. So now we’re trying to make sure that we catch those interactive elements.

Steve: Yep Cool.

[00:43:18] BoardScribe

Steve: Finally, let’s talk a little bit about, BoardScribe. If you missed our previous livestream where we introduced BoardScribe, BoardScribe is an accessible board and meeting minutes agenda, plugin. Just helps you facilitate the logging of meeting minutes, for your board, or any kind of, organization where you have to log these things on the web.

And what we found through a lot of our audits and remediations is a lot of times this is not done in a very accessible way. So we’ve created something to help facilitate that to ensure that it’s done accessibly, because a lot of the organizations that have these requirements around posting meeting minutes and agendas, also fall under Section 508, ADA, the European Accessibility Act, Title II in the US. They have requirements around accessibility. So we wanted to be able to provide a tool for them to be able to do that, and we have-

William: And currently a lot of people are actually just looking for a well-rounded simple meeting plugin as well.

Steve: Yeah.

William: So not necessarily for accessibility reasons, they just need an events manager of some kind.

Steve: Yes, totally. Totally.

We have released the free version of this, and I will tease a little bit that the Pro version is in alpha stage right now. It’s nearing a beta stage, and will be released very shortly after this livestream. So we will-

William: Alpha free because Steve keeps finding bugs.

Steve: We gotta find the bugs. I find them-

William: Steve gets them fixed first.

Steve: I find them, William squashes them.

What’s changed in BoardScribe since it released, right?

William: In the free version, we actually were considering a Pro feature for CSV imports. It turns out that’s just gonna be a generally usable feature for everyone, and we made the decision actually just to port that right into free. So free users will get the CSV importer.

Steve: Yeah.

William: And they should already have it. Actually, it should already be released.

Steve: Yep.

William: People should already be able to use the importer.

Steve: Yeah, it was released with version, 1.1.0. Yeah. Which was released… Let me find you a date.

Three weeks ago? Is that right?

William: That sounds about right.

Steve: Let me look here. Yeah, three weeks ago. Exactly. Do you wanna pull that up, or do you want me to pull it up?

William: Yeah.

Steve: Are you good?

William: So I’ll pull, Okay … BoardScribe up. Brand-new fresh install, no meetings at all in my BoardScribe instance. If I were to go to the settings page and choose the import option, and then scroll all the way to the end. Ignore some of these. These are pro columns.

Steve: You’re on Pro. Do you wanna, turn Pro off?

William: I don’t know. It may not work.

Steve: Yeah.

Here’s your sneak peek of pro, of BoardScribe Pro.

William: I’ve deactivated the Pro now. I go back to the Board Meetings menu item, Settings, and choose Import. Here’s the table, date, agenda URL, meeting minutes, not held, and publish date. And the only required item here is the date field. So if I were to come down and I click Choose file at the bottom, I can get the pick. That’s the wrong folder.

Steve: You find the file. I’ll switch back once you have it.

William: Yeah.

Yeah, so I have this file here now. If you pull up.

Steve: You ready? All right.

William: Yep. In my file browser here, I have this test file that I’ve been working with as I’ve been building the plugin. So I’m gonna click that, and I’m gonna drag it into the file picker. Bulk means import .csv, and I click this Import meetings button. It’s going to an “Import complete. 105 rows imported. 0 skipped, and 3 rows are scheduled for the future.” This comes up as a notice. It also gets read out to screen readers when this appears.

And if I were to click back to the Board Meetings list, we now have 108 total different meetings across various dates, all the way back to probably 2019 in my test here. But some of them are in the future: December, November, October.

Steve: Yeah.

William: So these are scheduled. The system handles that just fine.

Steve: So while you’re here, I just noticed that there’s another feature that we added since the initial release, and that is the Admin Columns.

William: Correct.

We now have a Title, which was there previously. The Meeting Date, also here previously. Canceled, I think, was here before.

Steve: No, I don’t know if any of them were there.

William: Oh, no, you’re right. Actually, we only had Title and Date.

Steve: Yeah, like the out of the box WordPress, yeah.

William: Yeah. Now we have a Meeting Date, Canceled, Agenda, and Minutes columns. Now, the Meeting Date is sortable, so if I were to click on that, you can actually sort it by descending or ascending. And, the Agenda column, you can now actually click directly on to see what the Agenda is or the Minutes are. You can just click these links. I’m not gonna click them because I don’t believe I have the files.

Steve: Yeah.

William: In this local, but yeah.

Steve: Yeah, so these are just some small steps that we’ve made, from some early feedback from BoardScribe.

BoardScribe is a free plugin that you can find on WordPress.org and download and give it a try.

[00:49:33] What’s Next?

Steve: And, that kind of wraps us on all of our new features, but while we’re here, William, do we wanna tease this a little bit?

William: Yeah. Let me just activate BoardScribe Pro again. And if I were to come to the, the Board Meetings tab again, you will see there’s additional items under the main Board Meetings navigation link. Board Meetings and Add New Meeting was here before. Settings was also here, but there’s also Locations, All Documents, Types, and Groups. And if I were to click into the Groups one, you will see this is a Taxonomy. Types is also a Taxonomy, and we pre-fill it with Regular Meeting, Retreat, and Special Meeting as three fields, but you can add any type you like.

You can also add any group you like as well. And if I were to come to All Documents… Previously, Agendas and Minutes would be files that you would link by URL only. Now, you can create any type of document you want right here. And if I were to click Add Document is just a standard editor. You can fill it with whatever you want. You don’t need to have your Agendas be PDFs anymore.

Steve: That are not-

William: That

Steve: That are typically not the most accessible.

William: Technical. So now you would just create the content here with the standard editor in WordPress however you want. And if you only have the classic editor, these will be classic, but block editor is also fully supported.

If I leave this page and go to Settings, Locations and click Add New Location, you can… this is a full suite of different types, so you can have either an In-person meeting, Virtual meeting, or a Hybrid meeting, and it adjusts the fields to fill out as needed. All of these fields are optional, including these other actually flagged optional fields for Phone and Email, but you can put the Room Number, the Address, the City, different Countries, ZIP code, and Instructions. This is what you would expect if you were running in-person meetings. You would expect to be able to give people instructions on how to get there, and the address generally.

Steve: Yeah, and this is so you can collect these in a Locations custom post type and reuse them over and over again.

Yeah.

William: And you can create one location, and in the sidebar we have this metabox where you can start typing in a meeting. And you can actually just assign this right here from the location you create to any meeting that already exists.

And this might become read-only, and you might not be able to do this before we release, but currently you can.

Steve: Yeah.

William: And hopefully that stays that way.

Steve: We can give a quick rundown on the Meetings, and,

William: Yes. So this is actually one of the biggest chunk of change-

Steve: And some of these changes are gonna come to an update to free here very soon as well. We don’t have to go super deep on this, but we can just do a high level.

William: Yeah. We gave a full UI overhaul on this so that it doesn’t just present you a whole bunch of fields to display. The Meeting Date is already existing in free. The Meeting Not Held exists in free. But Location… so if I were to click the Add location button, currently it says, “No location set.” This modal opens up, and I can choose an existing location if I had created any of them. Since I didn’t, you could also click the create a new location. And if I were to click that, all the same fields are present in the modal that is available. So you can create your location here. And any location you make will be reusable. You probably… Most people only need to create one location and can assign it to every meeting.

But if you have several locations, you can make them ad hoc per meeting or assign existing ones. And again, all of the models you can click back to go back to the options.

If I were to close this, we have Agendas and Minutes, which are similar fields to what’s in for you right now. However, they can only really accept a URL. Now, you can pick a BoardScribe document. So that documents thing that I showed at the beginning, if you were to create documents there, you can now assign them to an Agenda. You can assign the same thing, a BoardScribe document to Minutes, and we have Supporting Documents which also supports BoardScribe documents.

All of these also export or support external URLs or picking a file from the Media Library also there are some Video fields, Livestreams, Recordings, Transcripts. The livestream can only be a URL. It wouldn’t make sense for that to be anything else. Similar for a Recording, although now that I see this, this probably could also support Media Library.

I’ll take a note of that. Transcripts, Support Media Library, external URLs, or BoardScribe documents.

Steve: We’ve built in this whole layer of what we’re calling BoardScribe documents to help facilitate you creating accessible pages for your Meeting Minutes, Agendas, your Transcripts, Supporting Documents to help facilitate you making something semantic rather than a PDF that a lot of time has not been properly tagged, to be an accessible PDF.

We’re trying to facilitate more accessibility in the posting of these things without you having to go create a page, and then link the page, but then you have this page that’s not categorized, hierarchically correct, in a correct way.

William: And we’ve built this based on what we see our clients’ needs have been.

However, we know that our client needs aren’t the same as everyone’s needs, so this Supporting Documents field actually exists to help support that. So if I were to click Add Document, just…

Steve: Did you put in a sanitizer?

William: I did. So now I need to type something.

Steve: There.

William: But if I were to save that external URL, you can actually add as many as you want.

Oh, I don’t have any images or anything to show, but you can have as many supporting documents as you need to make sure that this supports whatever your use case for this meeting display might be.

You may only wanna have, It might contain approval documents, budgets,things that aren’t on the agenda or the minutes of the meeting are now fully supported here in the Supporting Documents, and you can change the title to whatever you choose, or you can place any of the items with Media Library or whatever.

Steve: Yeah, so we’ve done quite a bit… a deep dive in the recreation of the UI and the UX here, the user interface and user experience here, because we were starting to collect something that, was just a pile of fields, and we wanted to collect this into our own componentized UI to help facilitate users building out their Meetings and their Agendas and helping with every step of the way.

A lot of extra work, but, we are-

William: Yeah, no kidding.

Steve: We are pretty happy with where it is, and you can look for this new UI to come to free very soon, and for the Pro plugin to be dropping very soon as well.

William: Yeah. One thing I didn’t call out actually, so in the sidebar you will see there’s two standard Taxonomy fields. If you have used WordPress posts editor before, you’ll be familiar with these. These work exactly how you would expect, and these map directly towards the groups that appear in the left main menu, groups and types.

Steve: Yeah.

William: Main groups, main types. Okay. Assign them however you choose. And you can use these for filtering in the block or the shortcode.

Steve: Yeah. So we’ll do a follow-up, livestream probably next month, where we’ll go through BoardScribe Pro in very detail, show you the block and how you output all this stuff and how you present it. Some new templates that are coming to Pro, different ways you can show this. Whether it’s in a table view or a list view or a timeline view, and, ways that you can kinda use this to kinda be a replacement for your events calendar eventually. Look for that in an upcoming Changelog livestream.

That may be a cool episode to actually just build.

We actually build a whole meeting minutes,

William: Yep.

Steve: … Website or a page or vertical or something, live on the livestream. I think that’s all the things, William, unless you have anything else.

William: I do believe that covers everything.

Actually there is one thing I think I did include it and it didn’t get mentioned somewhere.

So if we were to come back to the Issue Explorer, something that was actually corrected is you can now actually search code snippets by the code snippet.

Steve: Ah.

William: Not in this build apparently, but that is coming to fix. And that was hotly asked for.

Steve: Yeah. So we did a release today, and you may not be on today’s release, but, yeah, that was a requested feature and-

William: Yeah, so you could search by contents of snippets before, but you couldn’t search for the markup of snippets. Now you will be able to actually search for that by the… maybe it was here. It is here.

Steve: Oh.

William: So you can now search for it here by the affected code.

Steve: Yep, very cool. We’re always working on improving the Issues Explorer, and we have gotten great feedback from users about it, and about the speed of it, and how the ease of use, and how it’s like a one-stop shop for all of your accessibility issues.

William: Yeah, remember how slow it was. I only have 146 issues, but remember if there was 146,000 issues, how slow it would be to use the old interface.

Now, it is literally the same speed.

Steve: Yeah.

William: That fast.

Steve: Very fast. Cool. I think that kind of encompasses what we’re doing to make Accessibility Checker work with builders and other plugins and we are trying to make other plugins to help facilitate a holistic approach to your website accessibility.

We just encourage you guys to download these plugins, download Accessibility Checker for free and BoardScribe free from WordPress.org and give them a try.

If you like them, please give us a review on WordPress.org. We prefer five-star reviews only.

William: I’ll accept a four star if you let me upgrade it to a five when I fix…

Steve: Right.

William: what you asked for.

Steve: We will work to get you to a five star if you’re not at a five star.

Please contact us, give us your feedback. We are always open for questions and features. You can find Equalize Digital in all the places. You can find us at equalizedigital.com and you can find several of us on X and in all kinds of corners of the internet.

Please join us next time, where I believe we will be talking about BoardScribe Pro in very much in detail, and we are excited-

William: I kind of just spoiled that there, didn’t I?

Steve: Yeah…

William: showing all the things.

Steve: We’re gonna go-

William: Yeah, we’ll build next time.

Steve: We’ll go deeper. That was just a taste.

You just wanna give them a taste and then they’ll come back for more. So join us next time. We appreciate having you here today. Take care.

William: Bye.