Sitemorse has been running automated accessibility tests for nearly 20 years. During this time, website accessibility guidelines have moved on from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0, first published as a recommendation in May 1999 to the current standard, WCAG 2.1, published in June 2018.  

As guidelines have been updated, we at Sitemorse have strived to ensure our assessments are reporting on the latest standard and have updated our tests, checks and measures to include new areas to assess. 

Recently we’ve seen a shift, whilst WCAG is well established, many organisations have started to look at other ways that accessibility for websites can be managed, going further than just looking at the WCAG guidelines.

To support this requirement, we’re pleased to announce that Sitemorse accessibility assessments now also include all the deterministic axe rules.

The axe rules include a number of best practices which help identify common accessibility problems. By including the axe rules in our assessments we are now able to offer more thorough accessibility assessments. First, our assessments read the code of the page, and then look at the operation of the page. This has increased the range of accessibility assessments that we can run using automation as well as some that were, until now, only possible to do manually which cover both desktop and mobile pages. Assessments on both Sitemorse.com/check and our client assessments using the new Sitemorse engine will now include the axe rules clearly indicated.