New Rules and Bug Fixes

As part of our launch of the Spanish language version of WAVE, we recently updated several components of the WAVE backend framework and evaluation rules.

In addition to the Spanish version, notable new features include:

• Better Unicode support
  • WAVE support for UTF-8 has been vastly improved. Evaluation of web content containing Unicode characters or foreign languages should now work correctly.
• New evaluation rules.
  • Missing structure. WAVE now issues an alert on pages that do not contain any headings. While this may not be an error on all web content, most full size documents should have a heading structure. The absence of any headings is usually an indication accessibility issues – that the document needs structure or that visual headings should be marked up as true headings.
  • Empty link. WAVE now flags as an error all links that do not contain any text. Because links provide functionality, assistive technologies require some text to be read when the link is encountered. If a link is empty, screen readers will revert to reading the link URL, which often is not helpful.

In addition, lots of small bugs and other issues were fixed, many of which were originally reported to us by WAVE users.