AAArdvark

AAArdvark AAArdvark helps teams make their websites accessible and compliant through automated testing, issue tracking, and expert accessibility consulting.

AAArdvark helps organizations make their websites accessible and compliant with ADA, Section 508, and WCAG standards. Our accessibility testing platform combines automated scans with visual issue tracking, collaboration tools, and expert audits to help teams find and fix accessibility barriers faster. We believe accessibility should be approachable, actionable, and integrated into every stage of digital design and development - not an afterthought.

09/04/2026

Every site in your AAArdvark workspace now has an Accessibility Score. A website with nothing but an automated scan behind it will get a B at best.

That limit is on purpose.

You run a scan, you get a list of problems, and then comes the hard part. Is that good? Is it better than last month? Which website needs you first? A list of problems answers none of those.

So every site now carries a letter grade with a 0 to 100 score behind it. What makes it different from most scores you have seen is that the grade is capped by how much testing has actually been done.

Automated tools only catch part of what matters. So a site that has only been scanned tops out at a B, however clean that scan comes back. Reviewing the potential problems and testing by hand in Visual Mode is what lifts the ceiling. Every grade is labeled so you know which one you are looking at: Automated only, In testing, or Manually tested.

A score that hands out an A for a passing scan is telling you something that isn't true.

Here's where the score shows up:

• The workspace dashboard is now a triage list. Every site shows its grade, where it sits in the workflow, and one next action. The sites that need attention sort to the top.
• Each site's own dashboard leads with where that site stands and what to do next, based on your role on the site.
• A new Trend Report charts the score over time against the grade bands, along with open versus resolved problems and how testing coverage is growing. Look at 30 days, 90 days, or 12 months.
• A new downloadable report puts all of it into a PDF under your own business name and colors, ready to hand to a client or a manager.

One thing worth saying plainly: the score reports progress, never compliance. No number can tell you a website is accessible. That still takes testing by hand and real people using the site.

Log in and see where your sites stand: https://bit.ly/4A1YGC6

08/28/2026

Your homepage probably answers at more than one web address.

That sounds like a technical curiosity until you audit the site. A plain HTML site serves its homepage at both / and /index.html. A site running on Microsoft's IIS server answers at / and /default.aspx. Add a trailing slash, a tracking tag picked up from an email campaign, or an accented character that got encoded along the way, and one page is suddenly several different addresses.

Each of those is a page you scan, a page you review, and the same set of issues you fix again. If your plan counts pages, it's also a page you paid for and don't actually have.

Until last week, AAArdvark counted them separately too. Now it doesn't.

We built one place in the app that decides whether two addresses point at the same page, and every screen that matches, imports, or deduplicates a page now asks it. A trailing slash, a default homepage filename, an encoded accent, a repeated slash, a fragment, a tracking parameter, and query parameters in a different order all resolve to a single page.

Some things deliberately stay separate. /about and /about.html are two pages, because plenty of servers serve them independently and the content can differ. A www address and a non-www one are a different site, not a different page.

We also left your saved addresses alone. Some servers answer at /about/index.html and return a "page not found" error for /about/, so AAArdvark compares addresses without ever rewriting the one it stored.

Visual Mode got the same fix. And if a site is already holding the same page twice, that can now be cleaned up.

This is worth knowing no matter what you audit with. A page and a web address were never the same thing.

08/26/2026

Every site has a modal. A share dialog, a confirm, a sign-up, a cookie notice. And most
of them are a div with a z-index and a focus trap someone copied off a blog post in 2019.

Here is the thing nobody told you: that advice is out of date. The browser will now trap
focus for you, make the rest of the page unreachable, handle Esc, and put focus back
where it came from, all without a single line of JavaScript. The hard part got solved.
What is left is the part that still breaks, and it is not the part people are working on.

In this stream we are building a modal dialog from an empty file, testing it with a
keyboard and a screen reader as we go. We start with the hand-rolled version most
codebases actually have, find five separate ways it fails, and then delete almost all of
it and watch four of those failures fix themselves.

We will cover:

• The modal you probably have, and the five tests that break it in under a minute
• Why writing aria-modal="true" does not make it true
• The focus trap bug that is in nearly every hand-rolled version
• Swapping to the dialog element and showModal, and what you get for free
• The three attributes people wrongly copy over during that swap
• Giving a dialog a name, and why "dialog" with no name leaves people stranded
• Where focus should land when a dialog opens, and why the close button is the wrong answer
• Locking the page behind it, because inert and still are not the same thing
• Closing with form method="dialog" and reading back what the user chose
• The one case where the browser's automatic focus return has nowhere to go
• closedby, the 2026 attribute that deletes your click-outside listener
• Animating a dialog in plain CSS, and honoring reduced motion

This one is for developers who want to know what is actually going on under a modal,
and for anyone who has inherited one and needs to work out whether it is any good. If
you have a component library modal in your project right now, you will leave knowing
how to test it in about ninety seconds.

Bring your questions. We test as we build, so you will see the failures and the fixes
in real time.

08/26/2026

Every site has a modal. A share dialog, a confirmation, a sign-up, a cookie notice. And most of them are built on advice that's quietly gone out of date.

For years, the way to build an accessible modal was to write your own focus trap, fake a backdrop, and manage focus by hand. That was the right answer at the time. Browsers have caught up since, and now they'll do the hardest parts for you. A lot of code in production hasn't caught up yet.

Join Natalie today at 1pm Pacific as she builds a modal dialog from an empty file, testing it with a keyboard and a screen reader as she goes. She starts with the hand-rolled version most codebases actually have, finds five separate ways it fails, then deletes almost all of it and watches four of those failures fix themselves.

She'll cover:

• The five tests that break a typical modal in under a minute
• The focus trap bug hiding in nearly every hand-rolled version
• What the browser handles for you now, and the three attributes people wrongly carry over
• The four things it still won't do, including the one that determines whether a screen reader user knows where they are
• How to test any modal in about ninety seconds

This is part two of Build It Live, the series where Natalie builds a common component properly and tests it as she goes. Part one covered tabs.

For developers who want to know what's really happening under a modal, and for anyone who's inherited one and isn't sure whether it's any good.

https://bit.ly/4xjBQUJ

08/19/2026

An agency wrote to us on a Tuesday afternoon. Our sitemap import was broken across their client sites. Instead of adding pages, it kept sending them back to the dashboard.

The fix was live one hour and 47 minutes later.

They were stuck until then, and it wasn't one website. It was a whole list of clients at once. You can't check pages for accessibility problems if you can't get the pages into the tool in the first place.

The next morning they wrote back:

"Looks resolved now and I LOVE the new ability to organize via post type/category! Awesome!"

That second sentence is the one we keep thinking about. They weren't only unblocked. They had already found a feature we built for exactly their situation, which lets you group a site's pages by post type and category. If you look after a lot of client sites, you can pull up just the blog posts, or just the product pages, instead of scrolling through hundreds of rows.

So why would we post about our own bug?

Because every accessibility tool has bugs, ours included, and no sales page tells you what happens when you run into one. That's the part worth knowing before you buy. Do you get a real person who ships a fix the same afternoon, or a ticket number and a place in line for the next big release?

Agencies feel this more than anybody. A tool that stops working on Tuesday afternoon turns into an awkward client email by Friday.

If you've been waiting on a support queue lately, we'd like to hear how that went for you.

08/12/2026

Is it time to get ready for WCAG 3?

It's a fair question, and you have probably run into some very confident answers. Search for it and you will find articles explaining the new Bronze, Silver, and Gold conformance levels, the scoring system, and exactly how your team should prepare. Plenty of them were published this year.

Then you open the actual draft, and it does not quite say that.

So let's read it together. In this session we will open the current Working Draft of WCAG 3.0, the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and go through it live. You will see which parts have genuinely settled down, which parts the W3C working group has openly labeled as still being figured out, and how to tell the difference yourself.

We will cover:

• Where WCAG 3 actually stands right now, and the maturity labels the W3C puts on its own sections
• Bronze, Silver, and Gold: what the draft really says, including the threshold still listed as to be determined
• Why WCAG 2.2 is still the standard you are held to, in the W3C's own words
• The genuinely interesting parts almost nobody writes about, including requirements about dark patterns, algorithms, and the data used to train AI models
• A repeatable way to check any accessibility claim against the source, so the next vendor email does not rattle you

This one is for anyone who has been asked "are we ready for WCAG 3?" and wanted a better answer than a shrug. No standards background needed. You do not have to enjoy reading specifications, though you might by the end.

Bring your questions. We will leave time at the end.

08/12/2026

Is it time to get ready for WCAG 3?

It's a fair question, and the answers out there are more confident than the specification is. Search for the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and you'll find articles laying out the Bronze, Silver, and Gold conformance levels and exactly how to prepare your team.

Then you open the actual Working Draft. The conformance section is labeled Exploratory, the W3C's own term for a section where they're still working out the direction. The Bronze threshold is listed as "to be determined."

So today we're reading it together. We'll look at where WCAG 3 actually stands, what the draft really says about those conformance levels, why WCAG 2.2 AA is still the standard you're held to, and the parts almost nobody writes about, including requirements about deceptive design and the data used to train AI models.

You'll also leave with a two-minute way to check a claim like this against the source yourself, which is the part that keeps working long after this draft changes again.

No standards background needed.

Today at 1pm Pacific.
https://bit.ly/4g2e5ZR

08/05/2026

The most important document on your website might not be a web page.

It might be a PDF. The course catalog, the benefits summary, the permit application, the lab results, the annual report. The thing people came to your site to get.

And it usually doesn't get checked when someone tests the website for accessibility.

Here's what that means in practice. When a PDF hasn't been tagged, someone using a screen reader gets a wall of text with no structure. There are no headings to jump between. There's no set reading order, so a two-column page can come out with the columns mixed together. Tables lose the header row, so the numbers arrive without the labels that made them mean anything. Images have no description, and form fields have no labels.

The document opens just fine. It simply can't be used.

So we're building PDF accessibility scanning into AAArdvark. Every PDF you add gets checked against PDF/UA, the accessibility standard for PDF documents. Each failed check becomes a real issue you can filter, assign, and track next to everything else on the site, and your dashboard shows how many of your documents pass, not just how many of your pages do.

Coming soon.

What's sitting in your document library, what you've had to fix by hand, what you gave up on. We'd love your thoughts.

Today is the last day.Enrollment for this cohort of the AAArdvark Circle closes tonight, July 31. After that, the doors ...
07/31/2026

Today is the last day.

Enrollment for this cohort of the AAArdvark Circle closes tonight, July 31. After that, the doors stay closed until we open the next group.

If you've been on the fence, here's a member, Graham, on what the Circle actually feels like from the inside:

"Natalie brings a gentle, generous presence to the Circle, sharing deep accessibility knowledge while listening with care. Her kind and supportive approach creates a safe space to learn, ask questions, and grow with confidence."

That's the room we've built. A place where you can ask the question you're a little embarrassed not to know the answer to, and get a real, kind, useful response.

For $549 a year, locked in for life, members get a focused mastermind every month, an open Q&A, a library of practical lessons, templates and pricing guides, and 20% off their AAArdvark subscription.

The next cohort kicks off August 7. Join before the day is out: https://bit.ly/4aAAoVn

[Image description: A quote graphic on a dark navy background. Large quotation marks frame the text "Natalie brings a gentle, generous presence to the Circle, sharing deep accessibility knowledge while listening with care. Her kind and supportive approach creates a safe space to learn, ask questions, and grow with confidence." Below it is a small photo of Graham Venning and the label "Graham Venning, Founder and CEO of Desert Wing Design, LLC." The AAArdvark logo and the URL https://bit.ly/4aAAoVn appear at the bottom.]

07/29/2026

Everyone is suddenly adding alt text to their images. Marketers are doing it because they heard it helps them show up in AI tools. And sure, a good description never hurts. But here is the thing accessibility people have known all along: alt text was always for humans first, and writing it well is more of an art than a checkbox.

The hard part was never adding the alt attribute. The hard part is deciding what to write. And the answer depends entirely on why the image is on the page. The exact same photo can need five completely different descriptions, or none at all, depending on the context around it.

In this hands-on workshop we will look at real images together and figure out the right alt text for each one. Bring your guesses to the chat. We will cover:

• Why context beats description, with real before-and-after examples
• When an image is decorative and should have empty alt text on purpose
• The most common alt text mistakes, and simple fixes
• What AI alt text generators get right, and the one thing they consistently miss
• A quick look at the code for captions and complex images, for the developers in the room

We will also run a live scan to see how a tool catches missing alt text, and where the judgment call is still yours to make.

This is for developers, designers, content creators, and anyone who publishes images on the web. You do not need to be an accessibility expert to follow along.

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