Product Updates

We have successfully pushed an update to all YuJa EqualGround Accessibility Governance Platform instances residing in the US, Canada, Australia, and the European Union. YuJa EqualGround now has a revamped website management interface with bulk actions, a new Issues Report for organization-wide visibility, and enhanced remediation workflows with integrated How-to-Fix guides. Additional improvements include faster processing performance, AutoPilot HTML preview, customizable widget placement, a new DocHub for simplified document management, and more.

1. Enhanced Website Pages Interface with Streamlined Navigation and Bulk Actions

   The EqualGround Websites Page has been completely revamped with new management capabilities, robust filtering options and bulk actions that help streamline your workflow when managing multiple websites:

   • Filter by website status and perform operations on multiple selected websites simultaneously.

     

   • The Website Details Page now has dedicated tabs for configurations, actions, and scan history across page groups.

     

   • Users can now access the issue panels from the web pages table to simplify management.

     

   • AutoPilot has its own dedicated page for HTML and rendered view access.

     

   • WCAG scoring now displays only the most relevant level based on your settings.

     

   • All engine results display together rather than on different pages.

     

2. Improved Processing Performance for Faster Website Scanning

   We’ve improved the processing speed throughout the Equalground platform, allowing users to identify and remediate accessibility issues more quickly and efficiently.

3. New AutoPilot HTML Preview Feature Added

   A new AutoPilot HTML preview feature has been added to EqualGround. This update enables real-time visualization of accessibility fixes before implementation, allowing users to toggle between the HTML code and web view renderings to validate corrections.

   

4. Customize the Browser Extension Widget Placement

   The EqualGround Browser Extension now gives you control over widget positioning through a new Extension Settings tab in your website configuration. Simply drag the widget to your preferred location and save; your customized placement will persist across all sessions.

   

5. New Issues Report Enables Viewing All Occurrences of an Issue Throughout the Organization

   The new Issues Report offers a hierarchical view of accessibility challenges by categorizing issues as severe, major, or minor with comprehensive statistical cards and trend charts. Easily identify problem areas by clicking any issue type to see affected websites, then selecting a website to view specific impacted pages, creating a seamless path from identification to resolution across your entire organization.

   

6. Integrated Remediation Guides Help Resolve Accessibility Issues

   The EqualGround platform now features integrated How-to-Fix guides that appear directly within the issue context, providing immediate remediation guidance without disrupting your workflow. These guides offer step-by-step instructions, code examples, and accessibility best practices to help users resolve accessibility issues.

   

7. New DocHub Improves Document Management

   This update adds a DocHub for simplified and more organized document management. Users can create and navigate customizable folder structures to organize their documents efficiently while managing their accessibility through the same intuitive interface they use for web pages.

   

8. Refreshed Login Page with Custom Branding Options

   The refreshed EqualGround login interface now supports complete customization through the Branding Settings panel. Easily modify button colors, upload custom background images, and preview changes to maintain consistent branding across your platform.

   

9. Enhanced New User Setup Experience with Step-by-Step Instructions

   The EqualGround browser extension setup process now features updated visual guides that provide clearer step-by-step instructions. Each configuration step is better illustrated to make the setup process more intuitive for new users.

   

10. New Option to Automatically Exclude Decorative Images from Being Flagged as Issues

    In certain cases, your content may contain images marked as decorative with an empty alt tag (alt=””) or a custom decorative tag. To ensure that these types of images are not flagged as issues, YuJa EqualGround now offers more flexibility for you to treat these images as decorative.

    

11. Customizable Top Bar Colors to Match Institutional Branding

    Personalize the platform’s appearance with modernized, high-contrast color options to maintain visual accessibility while matching your institution’s branding.

    

We have successfully pushed an update to all YuJa EqualGround Accessibility Governance Platform instances residing in the US, Canada, Australia, and the European Union. The release introduces an option to assign teams to manage specific page groups, an intuitive approach to start your website scan in minutes with our setup wizard, an option to scan and crawl multiple websites and page groups, and more.

1. Start Your Website Scan in Minutes With Our Setup Wizard
   YuJa EqualGround now features an intuitive setup wizard that streamlines your website scanning experience, guiding you through every essential step in one centralized flow. Within four simple steps, you can add or bulk upload websites to the platform, configure the scan scope and frequency, and initiate a scan to detect accessibility issues across your web pages and documents.
   
2. Website Scan Setup: Automatic Detection of All Websites Within the Top-Level Website
   Organizations that manage hundreds of websites will no longer have to enter each URL manually. YuJa EqualGround will automatically detect all websites under your top-level website (domain), allowing you to select the publicly accessible websites you want to configure for scans.
   
   
3. Website Scan Setup: Bulk Apply the Same Configuration Across All Websites
   When all selected websites require the same configuration for the scan depth and frequency, you can save time by applying the settings to all websites and beginning the scan immediately.
   
4. Assign Teams to Manage Specific Page Groups
   Building on our previous release, which allowed for assigning teams to manage an entire website, your organization can now designate teams to manage specific website sections by assigning them to page groups. This ensures each team has the necessary permissions, such as configuring scans, viewing accessibility reports, and analyzing web page performance for their assigned page group.
   
5. Scan and Crawl Multiple Websites and Page Groups
   Institutions with many sites can now choose to crawl or scan multiple websites or page groups rather than individually scanning each one.
6. Filter Website Reports by Page Groups
   You can now filter reports by selecting a page group, allowing you to focus on specific areas of your website for more detailed insights.
   
7. View Issues on Your Site and the Specific Pages Where They Occur
   You can now access a detailed list of issues detected on your website in the new Issues tab. This includes the number of occurrences and the specific web pages affected by each issue, allowing you to easily identify areas of concern.
   
8. More In-Depth AA and AAA Issue Detection for Web Accessibility
   Expanding on our existing accessibility checks, YuJa EqualGround now includes more detections for AA and AAA-related issues. Some of these checks include:
   • Web page contains descriptive headings and labels.
   • Components with the same functionality are presented consistently across web pages.
   • Ensure users have sufficient control over how content is presented to them.

   

9. View Full SEO Issue Names in Exported Report
   We’ve improved our exported SEO report to display descriptive names for all issue types to help you clearly understand the issues found.

We have successfully pushed an update to all YuJa EqualGround Accessibility Governance Platform instances residing in the US, Canada, Australia, and the European Union. The release introduces groups to organize web pages for independent scanning, an option to create teams and assign them for website management, customize the severity levels of issues, perform website crawls to locate new web pages for accessibility scanning, support for usability and SEO engines in the browser extension, and more.

The release includes a new Policy Hub to create specific rules to retrieve content, media, and documents on websites, a new usability report to view overall scores and scores for individual issues, new checks of personal information and unsafe domains from the usability engine, and information on how usability scores will be improved when each issue is resolved.

The release provides keyword search ranking evaluations, the option to use AutoPilot and Structural Remediation Add-ons for documents, a new Usability Engine to evaluate the text content quality and validity of links, new Behavior Engine to track visitor analytics, a YuJa EqualGround browser extension for web page scanning, the option to specify report access for different roles, a new Accessibility Best Practice metric to enhance web content accessibility, and more.

1. Evaluate How Keywords Affect Website Search Rankings With the Keyword Discovery Report 
   By integrating Google Search Console with YuJa EqualGround, you can generate the Keyword Discovery report, which helps determine how keywords are affecting website search ranking. The report can be categorized into four distinct groups:
   • Quick Wins: View words with the highest potential to drive traffic to your website.
   • High Impact: The most searched keywords that can significantly improve your website’s ranking.
   • High Performing: keywords with the most increased rankings to your URLs in the last 30 days.
   • Setbacks: Keywords that have decreased your URL rankings within the last 30 days

   

2. Use AutoPilot to Resolve Accessibility Issues in Documents 
   When assessing accessibility issues in documents found on your website, AutoPilot can automatically fix supported accessibility issues directly within the original document, ensuring the document does not need to be manually fixed and re-uploaded to your website. AutoPilot can remediate documents in DOCX, PDF, PPTX, and XLSX formats, addressing issues such as:
   • Insufficient contrast between foreground text and background.
   • PDFs that are not tagged properly for screen readers to interpret 
   • Difficulty in reading text due to small font sizes.

   

3. Use Remediation Max for Advanced Structural Remediation of PDFs
   Remediation Max provides in-line structural remediation to help fix a wide set of accessibility issues across PDF documents. These issues include:
   
   • Fixing the reading order of content by dragging and dropping elements into the correct reading preference.
   • Updating the type value of elements to ensure they are recognized correctly by screen readers.
   • Changing the language of elements so that they are read aloud correctly by screen readers.

   

4. New Usability Engine to Evaluate the Quality of Text Content and Validity of Links
   EqualGround offers a Usability Engine that evaluates websites based on three essential metrics to ensure they are user-friendly for viewers.
   • Readability: Whether your web content is for young adults or academic professionals, YuJa EqualGround provides a customizable readability checker. You can choose from six standardized methods to assess readability, such as the Automated Readability Index and the Coleman-Liau formula. After selecting a method, a grading scale can be selected to determine the maximum readability level suitable for your audience.
   • Spelling: YuJa EqualGround offers a built-in standardized American-English spell checker with the option to add words to your own customizable dictionary. As we continue to develop YuJa EqualGround, we will offer a wider range of languages.
   • Valid Links: All links on scanned pages are checked to ensure errors are not received.

   

5. New Behavior Engine to Track Analytics for Website Engagement
   The Behavior Engine monitors several key metrics to analyze visitors to your website. These issues include:
   • Total Visit: The number of visitors to your website.
   • Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website without taking any action.
   • Referrals: Visits to your sites from links that have appeared on other websites.

   

6. Download the YuJa EqualGround Browser Extension to Run WCAG and ARIA Checks for Web Pages
   With the launch of the new browser extension, you no longer need to be on the YuJa EqualGround platform to run your accessibility scans. On YuJa EqualGround, you can access Configurations > User Setup to install the extension and connect it to your platform. Once connected, the accessibility scan can be initiated for your desired web page listing all WCAG and ARIA issues and steps to remediate them.
   
7. More Granular Role Management Capabilities for Reports
   As an administrator, when creating a role, you can specify particular reports that the role will have access to rather than granting access to all reports. This allows for roles to be specialized in one or more areas of web content improvement.
   
8. Follow Our Best Practice Guidelines to Make Your Website More Accessible
   In addition to the Accessibility Report’s ability to detect ARIA and WCAG-level issues, YuJa EqualGround is offering more ways to enhance web content accessibility by providing a score based on our recommended Accessibility Best Practices. These best practices include detecting issues such as:
   • Any content on a website that is hidden behind tabs or within accordion components in the site’s design.
   • Images that contain duplicate labels.
   • Landmarks on a website that do not contain a unique name or role.

   

9. More In-Depth SEO Crawling by Including Six New Areas of Improvements
   We have improved our SEO crawling engine to include six new areas where we verify that your website adheres to the latest SEO best practices. The SEO crawler will check for:
   • Open Graph Tags:  Determines how URLs will appear when shared on social media platforms.
   • JSON-LD Structured Data Tags:  Provide organized, standardized, and machine-readable information about a web page.
   • Sitemap:  Provides details about the pages, videos, and files on your site and how they are related to each other.
   • Internal Links:  Checks for the number of internal links on your website.
   • Redirects:  Checks for the number of links that direct to another website.
   • H1 Tags:  Determines the topmost heading for your web page.
   • Alt Text:  Text that represents visual images.
   • Viewport Tags:  Tells browsers how to control viewport dimensions and scaling.

   

10. Choose the WCAG Conformance Level Your Organization Requires
    Your organization can now select the desired level of WCAG conformance to ensure that their websites meet accessibility standards. In the Website Settings, you can choose whether your organization prefers Level A, Level A and AA, or Level A, AA, and AAA accessibility standards for detecting issues.
11. More In-Depth Detection of WCAG and ARIA Accessibility Issues
    We have added more than a dozen accessibility checks for WCAG and ARIA-related issues. Some of these issues include:
    • Elements should have visible focus indicators so users can easily see where they are on the page when they navigate using a keyboard.
    • Lists on a web page should be structured correctly, specifically to ensure that assistive technologies can interpret and present the content accurately.
    • Ensure ARIA labels do not have redundant roles, as their implicit role defines their function.

    

12. New Filters to Organize Accessibility Issues by Their Components or WCGAG Criterion
    We have provided two new filters to the Accessibility Issues panel, allowing you to select whether to view issues by their WCAG criterion or to group issues by their component. The WCAG criterion filter will highlight the issue detected, along with the items affected by the issue. In the new component view, you will be able to see all issues within a related category in one view, including all link, checkbox, list, and button issues displayed in their respective viewport.
    

The release provides real-time accessibility integration with WordPress and Drupal, comprehensive insights into accessibility issues, a new Performance Report metric, use AutoPilot.AI to propose fixes for entire web pages, disable websites from being scanned, at-a-glance accessibility scores for documents, and assign one-time credits to scan pages.

1. Real-Time Accessibility Integration for WordPress and Drupal CMS Including AutoPilot.AI
   If you’re an administrator, you can now integrate your YuJa EqualGround Platform into WordPress and Drupal to detect accessibility issues in real time as you create websites. In addition, you will have complete access to AutoPilot to help suggest fixes for issues as they’re found.
   
2. Comprehensive Insights on Issues: What They Mean and Why They Matter
   YuJa EqualGround scans for over 100 potential issues, and we understand that you may not be familiar with each one. To simplify things, when an issue is detected, we now provide concise summaries explaining its significance and why resolving it is important.
   
3. New Performance Report Metric: Speed Index
   We’ve introduced a new Performance Report metric, the Speed Index, which measures how quickly content becomes visually available during page load.
   
4. Use AutoPilot.AI to Help Propose Fixes for Entire Web Pages
   In our previous release, we introduced the option to select an issue and for AutoPilot.AI to suggest how to fix it. Now, you can streamline the process by running AutoPilot.AI across an entire web page, allowing you to review all proposed fixes for accessibility issues at once.
   
5. Disable Websites from Being Scanned
   If you’re looking to pause recurring scans for specific websites, you can now disable those sites from being scanned by YuJa EqualGround.
   
6. At-a-Glance Accessibility Scores for Documents Detected on Web Pages
   When reviewing a document scan of a web page, detected files will display an accessibility score next to them, allowing you to prioritize and address the most concerning documents first.
   
7. Assign One-Time Credits to Page Scans
   In one-off cases where you require more credits than your monthly limit for page scans, you can contact your Client Success Manager to add additional credits that will remain on YuJa EqualGround until used.

The release provides new Performance, SEO, and Document reports, view WCAG accessibility issues for documents, use AutoPilot for in-line remediation suggestions, color-blind filters for the web report, the option to scan individual pages, specify multiple URLs to exclude from scans, navbar styling options, and the option to customize features available on your EqualGround Platform.

1. Review a Comprehensive Performance Report to Evaluate the Response Time of Web Pages
   Slow-loading content can quickly cause users to lose interest in websites. To enhance user experience, EqualGround offers a comprehensive performance report that evaluates the key speed metrics below, allowing ongoing analysis to maintain or improve performance over time.
   • First Contentful Paint: The time it takes to display the first piece of content.
   • Largest Contentful Paint: The time it takes to display the largest content. 
   • Total Blocking Time: The total time a web page is unresponsive while loading.
   • Time to First Byte: The time it takes for the browser to receive the first piece of information from the server.

   

2. View Analytics to Improve Search Engine Visibility with SEO Reporting
   The report offers an overview graph to track trends for the overall SEO score across your organization’s websites. Additionally, a table displays each website’s score and provides the option to review issues organized by the number of times they occur across your organization.
   
3. Evaluate the Accessibility of Files With Document Reporting
   The Document Report provides an in-depth analysis of file accessibility across your organization’s websites. Review analytics on the number of monthly issues and identify the most common problems found within documents.
   
4. Open Documents in EqualGround to Review WCAG 2.2 Accessibility Issues
   When reviewing reports, documents on the web page will automatically be detected. These documents can then be opened directly within EqualGround to see highlighted WCAG 2.2 accessibility issues and the steps required to resolve them.
   
5. Use AutoPilot for In-Line Remediation Suggestions to Improve WCAG, ARIA, and SEO Issues
   AutoPilot highlights problematic snippets of web page code and offers solutions to resolve them. These solutions can be easily copied and pasted into the web page’s code to ensure the issues are resolved.
   
6. View Visual Web Page Reports With Color-Blind Filters
   When reviewing reports in the visual web view, admins can enhance their experience by selecting between various color-blind filters. These filters include options for three common types of color blindness: Protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia.
   
7. Scan Web Pages Individually to Update Their Accessibility Scores
   Organizations can choose to enhance website accessibility one page at a time by scanning individual pages. This approach allows for targeted resolution of accessibility issues specific to each page, ensuring that all issues are addressed before moving on to the next page.
   
8. Add Multiple URLs to Exclude With the Wildcard Asterisk Character
   Administrators can specify a URL prefix when creating an exclusion URL list by appending an asterisk (*) at the end. This will ensure that all URLs starting with the specified prefix are automatically blocked from being scanned.
   
9. Custom Branding for the EqualGround Navbar
   Administrators can now personalize their EqualGround navbar by customizing its background and text colors and applying a gradient option.
   

The release provides a comprehensive Dashboard to view the overall accessibility of an institution, SEO auditing, an Accessibility Report for web pages, credit summary tracking, a new accessibility check for color contrast issues, and the option to subscribe to email notifications.

1. Comprehensive Dashboard Summary to View the Accessibility of an Institution
   EqualGround will collect the accessibility scores across an institution to provide a comprehensive summary of the institution’s accessibility. In-depth reporting can be viewed for each category by clicking View Full Report.
   
2. Detailed Reports for SEO Auditing
   We’ve built our own engine to crawl websites and analyze SEO-related issues such as:
   • Missing canonical tags to prevent duplicate content.
   • Links and documents are not crawlable.
   • Missing language tags for pages.
   • Links do not contain descriptive text.
   • Missing metadata from documents.
   • Invalid robots.txt file

   

3. Accessibility Report – Compare WCAG Criteria by their Score or the Number of Issues
   The Accessibility Report offers a comparative analysis of a selected web page’s WCAG criteria— A, AA, AAA, and ARIA. A graph visualizes these analytics, displaying them based on their accessibility score or the number of issues each criterion has. The report also displays the most common issues on the web page, organized by the WCAG success criteria.
   
4. Credit Summary to Track the Use of Scanned Pages and Documents
   EqualGround offers institutions credits for scanning web pages and documents. The Credits Usage Report tracks monthly credit usage and provides a usage history, allowing for trends to be analyzed.
   
5. In-Depth Accessibility Scanning for Documents
   Documents will be scanned to ensure they comply with WCAG accessibility guidelines. Administrators can then access details for their documents to view a list of identified accessibility issues.
   
6. New Accessibility Check for Color Contrast Issues
   To ensure sufficient color contrast between the text and the background, EqualGround will calculate the contrast ratio to identify occurrences of the issue. Website owners can then update their pages based on the report provided.
   
7. Subscribe to EqualGround Email Notifications
   Users can subscribe to receive email notifications alerting them to specific actions on the platform, such as completed scans or when the usage limit is about to be reached.
   

EqualGround is a brand-new product for real-time website accessibility auditing designed to enhance web accessibility. Backed by the latest WCAG 2.2 compliance guidelines, EqualGround scans entire websites and provides comprehensive evaluation reports for accessibility checks to help improve readability and navigation. 

The release provides options to initiate scans for WCAG 2.2 accessibility issues, customized website scans, initiate scans for multiple subdomains, exclude web pages from scans, view real-time progress of scans, view in-depth accessibility reports, track accessibility improvements over time, custom role management, SSO integration, and more.

1. Initiate Scans for WCAG 2.2- Aligned Accessibility Issues
   To provide an accessible website viewing experience, EqualGround will examine websites using industry-standard WCAG 2.2 levels of conformance (A, AA, and AAA), scanning pages and documents to generate accessibility scores for individual web pages.
   
2. Full Customization for Website Scans
   EqualGround offers comprehensive website scanning. For each website, admins can specify the depth, frequency, and schedule of scans.
   
3. Initiate Scans from Multiple Subdomains
   Administrators can designate several subdomains as entry points, which serve as the starting locations for EqualGround to crawl through web pages to identify accessibility issues.
   
4. Exclude Accessibility Scans for Specified Web Pages
   Administrators can specify web pages they would like to exclude from the accessibility scans to ensure that only desired pages are analyzed.
   
5. View the Progress of Current Scans
   After adding a website, users can initiate scans and monitor their progress in real time by viewing the scan status of each page as EqualGround crawls through the website.
   
6. View In-Depth WCAG 2.2 Accessibility Reports
   Admins will be able to review a comprehensive report on their scans in a visual web format or HTML text. They can quickly access information about the issues, including their level (A, AAA, or AAA), and identify where the issue occurs.
   
7. View an Accessibility Summary of Websites and Individual Web Pages
   Websites and individual web pages will have their own dashboard, which features a quick summary of the overall accessibility performance. The performance will be measured based on aria labels and WCAG A, AA, and AAA level issues detected.
   
8. Track the Improvements of Websites and Web Pages Over Time
   As websites and web pages enhance their accessibility, users can track the changes over time by reviewing the scan history to assess how scores have improved.
   
9. SAML-SSO Authentication Support
   In addition to manual login credentials, administrators can access EqualGround by signing in directly with their SAML-SSO integration.
   
10. Assign Custom Roles to Users
    Administrators can create custom roles on the EqualGround platform to provide users with different levels of access to view reports, initiate scans, and manage website settings.
    
11. Manage Users Within the Roster Management Dashboard
    Administrators can manage users on the EqualGround platform by adding users, assigning them new roles, and removing them from the platform.
    
12. Allocate Users to Manage Websites
    In addition to offering users different access levels, admins can allocate them to only manage and view specific websites.
    
13. Manually Trigger Scans to Immediately View Scores
    Administrators can trigger a manual scan instead of waiting for the scheduled scan to occur to instantly see a website’s latest scores.
    
14. Customize EqualGround’s Login Page
    Administrators can now customize the branding of their EqualGround login page by adjusting the colors of buttons and adding imagery.
    
15. Custom EqualGround Platform URLs
    Institutions can contact their Client Success Managers to create their own custom EqualGround Platform URLs.