Release v2: Accessibility and Privacy upgrades

I have been quiet for some time, but not anymore. Sitefig deployed a significant release last week. So, amidst the hush, I've been working hard to bring you an update that aligns with the feature requests gained from our customers.

While the deployments have been continuous and discreet, this new release bumps the version up to v2.0 as many new items have been updated and added.

What new features are available and why? #

The accessibility community posted several example websites with use cases in which automated auditing software fails. Claiming that most of the accessibility fails cannot be solved with automated software.

The goal is to solve as many "impossible" use cases as possible.

The first part we solved was WCAG2.1 Success criteria 3.1.1 and, more specifically, 3.1.2.

The two success criteria intend to ensure user agents, such as Jaws and NVDA, pronounce the words in the correct language. In many cases, the language needs to be corrected, or the language attribute is omitted.

When the language is not set or is just wrong, the results for most screen reader users would be similar to driving around Paris with an English GPS. Nothing will be understandable.

Sitefig analyses all content, including the language of title, description, alt and title attributes, to ensure all text is properly annotated with the correct language tag.

HTML5 and Screenreaders #

Screenreaders and browsers only sometimes play nice. Some HTML5 elements will be discarded even though using them makes sense. Sitefig now audits your websites for non-supported HTML5 elements.

Privacy upgrades #

Sitefig also records network traffic to identify potential privacy issues on your website. Most websites nowadays connect to many different domain names to load fonts, javascript, or images. These domains provide their services from different countries and continents.

Sitefig geolocates the IP addresses and offers additional Whois data for each domain that sets a cookie for every tracker and domain name to which your customers connect. You'll be surprised how geographically spread your website connections are.

Additionally, Sitefig records cookies before and after consent and categorizes each 3rd party cookie by function, goal, and company behind those cookies.

Sitefig also has PII scanners that scan for names, physical addresses, email and telephone numbers, VAT, credit card numbers, and other types of sensitive data. We have upgraded the physical address scanner and now support scanning in 11 languages and many more countries.

Supported EU Languages #

Sitefig supports the following languages when auditing for accessibility issues related to languages, as well as scanning for PII:

New documentation #

The documentation needed some love, and now it has been redesigned to align more with WCAG requirements and has a more straightforward and sleeker look.

Version 2.0 is a significant upgrade, and we will follow up with more detailed posts about the new features. I hope you enjoy it!

Previous:
European Accessibility Act and the private sector
Next:
Leveraging WordNet for Web Page Classification Using Semantic Networks

Related Posts

Hi there,

My name is Len Dierickx and I am the founder and developer of Sitefig

I have been working mostly on international websites managed by large companies and always found that it has been pretty difficult to get a grip on those corporate beasts.

Many times frustration was part of that experience. Instead of running around fires, I built many tools over the year. Tools that culminated in Sitefig, which is basically a webmaster on steroids.

Sitefig is 100% owned and bootstrapped by me.

If you'd like to get a demo account, or just want to have a talk about managing websites, send me an email or contact me on Linkedin