2020 AQA Product Updates

All of us on the AQA Product team understand that this year has been a challenging one. We hope that we provided some comfort by delivering our regular product releases in 2020. We've had two releases in 2020 and made some real advancements to the product, all based on customer feedback. 

2020 May Release 

Our largest release was in May when we gave all users more data and insight into their accessibility status and efforts. We also added more value for developers. 

Watch this 3 minute video to learn about the features added in the May or continue reading.

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Customizable Dashboards

We are introducing Team and Individual dashboards to provide insight, data and progress of your accessibility program in order to optimize your efforts and resources.

The main features are:

  • Team and individual dashboards are customizable and easily configurable
  • Ability to track data points over time, such as A11y Scores and conformance percentages
  • Many customizable widgets and data points

Store Manual Reviews in AQA Chrome Extension

The AQA Chrome extension has always identified accessibility issues that need manual review. It also guides you through the review. With this new release, AQA will remember your manual review results and can reapply them in future tests. This significantly reduces manual review time because it eliminates re-testing issues, especially for teams who are frequently testing sites and pages. This translates into more efficiency when you incorporate accessibility testing into your development process.

Additional Training Content and Tips

On your dashboard we have added tips, videos and feature highlights to improve general accessibility knowledge and how to use AQA. Your can select the most relevant topics for your shared team dashboard.

Improved Manual Review panel to organize manual review 

We’ve re-organized the manual review panel to reduce the time to check, assign, or flag accessibility issues. You'll find this helpful in your own manual accessibility reviews.

2020 September Release

Our AQA Q3 Release added more functionality, watch the video below as our Director of Accessibility Operations walks thru those updates or continue reading.

 

Custom Rule Sets

We’ve made it easier to customize what you test for. There is now a simple option to test for WCAG issues that can be definitively identified with AQA’s automated rules. Of course, you can still test for both automated issues and those that need manual review.

AQA always had the ability to create custom rulesets, but until now we have not enabled that functionality for all users. An example of a custom ruleset could be testing only for specific WCAG success criteria or creating a specific ruleset relevant to marketers or content managers. Our PM and Customer Success teams are available to help you understand if a custom ruleset would be helpful and aid you in configuring it.

Here are a few uses cases where this functionality may apply:

  • Create a ruleset for sprint testing that has reduced, or even no, manual review criteria. This could be just automated criteria or a mix of automated with key manual review criteria.
  • Create rulesets for different teams – for example Dev, QA and Marketing can each have different WCAG test requirements for their specific tasks.
  • Corporate standards where test requirements can be a mix or variation of WCAG standards.

Extend Site Scanning – Broken Links, Media and PDFs, and I/O errors

We are excited that AQA’s testing capabilities are extending beyond WCAG. It will now help you find broken links, links to media and PDF files, and any I/O (input/output) errors. A common challenge of making video and PDFs accessible is finding all of them on a site. This functionality will make the discovery process easy.

These capabilities will help improve overall website quality, support Section 508 testing and streamline discovery of non-html files such as video and PDF that need to be accessible.

Here are a few use cases:

  • Check for broken links across your site.
  • Collect all links to non-html resources, such as PDF and Video, so you can inventory them and make them accessible.
  • Discover I/O errors so you can investigate the cause.

Test URLs in an Excel file

We’ve added the capability to upload an Excel file that contains URLs and run a test. This will help anyone who uses lists compiled in Excel to identify pages to test.

Excel upload is in addition to our other user journey methods – user flow, single page, page collection, and screen reader flow. When using the Excel upload, you can even apply previously defined connection settings (for example, to staging) to streamline the test setup and execution.

Live Training Sessions

For all 2020 releases, we offered two live training sessions with UsableNet Director of Solutions Engineering, Roland Campbell. These sessions were recorded and are available upon email request. 

Contact Ruth Fuller, AQA Customer Success Manager if you have questions about these updates or how to fully utilize AQA to maintain accessibility, Schedule an AQA Consultation call.