Welcome to the Rocket Validator 2025 kickoff, where we’ll highlight some of the new features and enhancements we released during this year.
This has been a huge year for accessibility; together we’ve validated more than 11 million web pages, found more than 400 million HTML issues, and more than 93 million accessibility issues!
From expanded European accessibility support to new device emulation, privacy improvements, and smarter reporting tools, 2025 has been another year of making site validation easier and more reliable for teams of all sizes.
Before we dive into the highlights, we have a small end-of-year gift for you — stick around until the bottom of the post for a special discount to start 2026 with Rocket Validator!
But first, let’s take a look at what we accomplished in 2025…
Europe: Accessibility Becomes the Baseline
In 2025, accessibility in Europe moved from intention to action. The European Accessibility Act came into force on June 28, setting a clear and shared baseline for digital accessibility across the EU. For many organisations, this marked a turning point: accessibility was no longer something to plan “someday”, but a concrete requirement for websites, apps, and digital services offered to European users. The months leading up to the deadline sparked many conversations around readiness, responsibility, and how to approach accessibility in a sustainable way.
AI generated image by ChatGPT
For Rocket Validator, this year was also about getting closer to our European users. We expanded support for regional standards such as France’s RGAA, made pricing available in euros, and introduced European infrastructure to deliver faster checks and a smoother experience overall. These changes weren’t just responses to regulation—they reflected our belief that accessibility works best when tools are local, practical, and easy to use. Europe’s leadership in accessibility helped shape our roadmap in 2025, and we’re excited to keep building in that direction.
Reports: Privacy by Default
In 2025 we made a small change with a big impact: site validation reports are now private by default. While report URLs were already almost impossible to guess unless explicitly shared, many users told us they wanted stronger guarantees when working on internal projects or client sites.
By defaulting new reports to private, we made it easier to validate sites without worrying about accidental sharing. When collaboration is needed, reports can still be shared with a single click, striking a better balance between privacy, trust, and everyday workflows.
Stat Views: Clear Insights, Controlled Visibility
Following our shift to make validation reports private by default — giving teams confidence that their work stays confidential unless explicitly shared — we also introduced Stat Views as a way to bring controlled visibility to site performance over time.
Stat Views let you create and share custom dashboards that reflect key validation metrics like issue counts, error densities, and trends across domains or date ranges, so you can keep stakeholders aligned without exposing underlying reports unless you choose to. This feature makes it easier to track quality and accessibility improvements collaboratively while maintaining privacy and ownership of the underlying data.
Canonical URLs: Cleaner, Smarter Reports
To make site validation reports more efficient and easier to interpret, we introduced the Prefer Canonical URLs option — now enabled by default for all new reports and schedules.
This setting tells Rocket Validator to use a page’s canonical URL (when one is present in the page) as the primary address during crawling, dramatically reducing duplicate pages caused by query parameters or filter variations and helping reports stay well under the 5,000‑page limit.
The result is cleaner reports, faster performance, and lower validation costs for everyone.
Accessibility and HTML validators upgraded
The accessibility and HTML validation servers on Rocket Validator have been upgraded to the latest versions of Axe Core and W3C Validator Nu.
2025 saw the release of Axe Core 4.11, the latest version of the popular accessibility checker maintained by Deque, which a few performance issues, corrects a few bugs, and adds the French RGAA standard to many rules.
The HTML validation server has been kept up to date with the releases of W3C Validator Nu.
New iPhone Devices: Better Testing Across Screens
In early 2025 we expanded Rocket Validator’s Device Viewport Emulation options by adding newer iPhone models — including iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 in their standard, Plus, Pro, and Pro Max variants — to the list of devices you can emulate during accessibility and site validation runs.
This enhancement means you can now test how your pages render and behave across a wider range of actual device resolutions and scale factors, helping you catch layout, responsiveness, and accessibility issues that may appear only on certain screen sizes.
Basic HTTP Auth Support: Validating Behind Login Walls
In 2025 we added Basic HTTP Authentication support to Rocket Validator, making it easy to validate websites and pages that sit behind simple login gates. Teams can now securely provide credentials when setting up a check or schedule, allowing our crawler to authenticate automatically and access protected content.
This update ensures that internal environments, staging sites, and client-restricted pages can be included in accessibility and quality checks without extra workarounds, helping teams maintain comprehensive oversight across all their web properties.
Start 2026 with a huge discount!
We wish you all the best for the upcoming year and hope that 2026 will be full of new opportunities for all!
We’re offering a 26% discount in all our plans. And that includes yearly plans - on top of the standard “12 months for the price of 10 months” discount!
To take advantage of this offer, simply use the promo code HAPPY2026 at checkout. This code is valid until January 15th, 2026.
Let’s make the web more accessible for everyone in 2026!
Happy New Year! 🎉