Accessibility Checker upgraded to 3.5.0

The Accessibility validation server on Rocket Validator has been upgraded to the latest version of Axe released by Deque, Axe Core 3.5.0 which ands many new features and fixes some bugs:

Features

• aria-dpub-role-fallback: depreacte aria-dpub-role-fallback and move into aria-allowed-role (#1899) (8e25c20)
• aria-label: deprecate Element arg; use virtualNode (#1922) (d14981c)
• audit: allow runOnly option to accept an array of rules (#1889) (38d6a3f)
• color-contrast: greatly improve performance for very large sites (#1943) (9ea0065)
• core: add preload configuration option for media files (#1958) (8a62649)
• core/reporters/v1: Add failureSummary to incomplete results (#1972) (c88883d)
• get-element-stack: performant api to replace document.elementsFromPoint (#1842) (9ae07fb)
• i18n: add Danish (da-DK) translation (#1876) (fb6fc41)
• landmark-no-duplicate-*: add rule landmark-no-duplicate-main, don’t use html as element source for all duplicate rules (#1949) (5ec7894)
• layout-table: deprecate layout-table rule and checks (#1885) (d22cb30)
• matches: use VirtualNode and deprecate HTMLElement (#1988) (2600a06)
• rule: add color-contrast check for unicode characters, behind flags. (#1969) (0cd4037), closes #1906
• rule: identical-links-same-purpose (#1649) (9c73f62)
• rule: no-autoplay-audio (#1946) (b2373cb)
• svg-img-alt: rule for when svg needs a title (#1953) (9491e09)
• deprecate the use doT.js for messages (#1938) (a2ddba3)

Bug Fixes

• color-contrast: properly pass options to check (#2033) (26b99c0)
• commons: avoid unicode regex encoding in axe.min.js (#2024) (ae90dc4)
• add tags with dots for wcag sc (#1849) (2f1ab36)
• compute orientation lock from various transformation func… (#1937) (c987de0)
• ignores axe.ping responses that do not contain axe=true (26cb1fb)
• input[role=button][value=’correct’] should pass (#1897) (4635fef)
• remove heading from list of widget roles (#1882) (a8cbf71)
• link-name: test role=link when there is no href (#1921) (6db28bc)
• remove isNaN check (#2010) (5359b3f)
• aria-allowed-attr: allow aria-details (#1956) (79e1c58)
• aria-allowed-role: allow role combobox on input tel, search, url, and email (#1850) (ba75961)
• aria-hidden-focus: mark as needs review if a modal is open (#1995) (28a3553)
• aria-required-children: allow comboboxes with more popup roles (#1950) (35a24c0)
• aria-roles: report error for fallback roles (#1970) (a1b7e08)
• aria-valid-attr-value: mark as needs review for aria-current with invalid value (#1998) (39b8eae)
• axe.d.ts: RunOnly.values should not accept a RunOnlyOption (#1888) (b68aa19)
• build: add lang query parameter to helpUrl when builing with a locale (#1909) (8c5f9ef)
• color-contrast: improve speed and accuracy of code blocks with syntax highlighting (#2003) (1b6ab42)
• color-contrast: mark as needs review for text that contains only non-BMP characters (#2005) (e559be0)
• color-contrast: support IE extension context (#2008) (62e31ea)
• color-contrast: take into account parent opacity for foreground color (#1902) (8719700)
• getElementStack: do not add hidden elements to the stack (#1991) (759d88d)
• is-focusable: use tabindex attribute instead of property (#1912) (042a148)
• is-icon-ligature: ignore whitespace characters (#1908) (7d2b2a6)
• is-ligature-icon: rename canvas to canvasContext (#1880) (de9885d)
• isFocusable: return true for summary element and false for details element with summary child (#1957) (34ec2d7)
• listitem: clarify that li elements must be contained in a list or role=list (#1894) (6d8cfee)
• locales: fix incompeteMessageFallback to be a string rather than an object (#1853) (88677a9)
• meta-viewport: mark as a best-practice rule instead of wcag failure (#1960) (766f962)
• only-listitem: add message about invalid role on li elements (#1954) (c3049ab)
• page-has-main: do not find hidden elements (#2001) (6429e60)
• page-no-duplicate-main: do not fail for duplicate hidden elements (#2000) (414dfb1)
• preload: reject promise axe.utils.preload when XHR fails (#2009) (b406b1f)
• region: allow content in roles with implicit aria-live (#2002) (a8d829e)
• region: return outermost regionless node instead of html (#1980) (8d77be2)
• region-rule: allow live regions with explicit roles (#1999) (b49bd95)
• run: throw error if axe.run is called after a run has started but not completed (#1914) (3252a02)
• server-side-image-map: return as needs review rather than failure (#1898) (d544856)
• tabindex: don’t error when tabindex property is overridden (#1910) (6b82a4c)
• td-has-headers: greatly improve performance of td-has-headers rule (#1887) (a550309)
• removes flaky test in axe Pro api check (b2bdcd1)
• typings: add proper return value to getRule (#1900) (4d907f8)
• unicode: stop parsing escaped unicode strings (#1997) (7447d03)

Current accessibility ruleset

Check out the full list of accessibility rules that are being checked currently by our web crawler

Time to re-check your sites!

As usual, it's recommended to re-check your sites after the validation servers have been upgraded, to get the most up-to-date results. Remember that you can schedule your reports to run periodically, so you don't have to do that manually every time.