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Welcome to the Lumar Knowledge Base

December 2023 - including Adjustable Report Weighting, New Hreflang Validation Reports, Accessibility Benchmarks and Project Setup Preview for Accessibility

Andrew Levey
  • Updated

New WCAG 2.0 Reports

Release Date: December 20th 2023

The axe digital library recently added four new tests for WCAG 2.0 ARIA Level A, so we’ve added new reports to include these. The reports are:

  • ARIA braille equivalent issues: Highlighting pages that do not have a non-braille equivalent for aria-braillelabel and aria-brailleroledescription.
  • Deprecated ARIA role: Highlighting pages that use deprecated roles.
  • Conditional ARIA attribute issues: Highlighting pages where ARIA attributes are not used as described in the specification of the element’s role.
  • Prohibited ARIA attributes: Highlighting pages where ARIA attributes are prohibited for an element’s role.

You can see these reports in the ARIA A subcategory in Level A.

Custom Extractions for Accessibility

Release Date: December 20th 2023

Custom Extractions are now available in accessibility projects, and can be set up using RegEx in the advanced settings in step 4 of the crawl setup.

Custom Extractions can help you easily identify certain page templates or all pages that have a specific component. Custom Extractions can also be used to ‘extract’ specific information at scale from all pages that match the RegEx (e.g. ‘published date’ on articles).

Screenshot of the advanced settings in step for of the crawl setup, showing the Custom Extraction section.

Once created and a new crawl is complete, you can see the results in the ‘Custom’ dashboard and reports in the left-hand navigation.

Screenshot of the Analyze Custom Extraction dashboard, with the Custom link in the left hand navigation highlighted.

Find out more about how to use RegEx to set up custom extractions.

Project Setup Preview for Accessibility

Release Date: December 20th 2023

We’ve added a project setup preview in the crawl setup, so you can verify settings and check the crawl configuration before starting the crawl. For example, using the preview feature you can make sure Cookie settings are correctly configured, and check for 401 errors upfront. This means you can spot issues before the crawl starts, and make the necessary amendments rather than discovering issues when crawl completes.

You can access the preview in step 1 of the crawl setup process, where you’ll see an option to ‘Save & Preview’.

Screenshot of Step 1 of the Lumar crawl setup, with the save and preview button highlighted.

Once you’ve reviewed the preview and everything looks OK, you can go back to the settings using the button in the bottom left corner, or the x in the top right.

Screenshot of the project setup preview result with the back to settings and cross to exit highlighted.

You can also access the ‘Save and Preview’ option in step 4 of the crawl setup process. Just click on Advanced Settings, and you’ll see the option just underneath.

Screenshot of step 4 of the Lumar crawl setup process, with the advanced settings toggle and save and preview options highlighted.

Accessibility Benchmarks

Release Date: December 12th 2023

You can now see how your site compares to industry benchmarks for accessibility. The benchmarks are created from monthly crawls of a variety of different websites. The crawls are then aggregated to create an average across ‘All Industries’. The selection of websites being crawled includes sites from specific industries which are used to create the following industry benchmark scores:

  • Communications
  • E-commerce
  • Fashion & Apparel
  • Financial Services
  • Manufacturing
  • Publishing
  • SaaS
  • Technology
  • Travel & Hospitality

Find out more about industry benchmarks.

Adjustable Report Weighting

Release Date: December 7th 2023

Every report has a sign to determine if it considered to be an error, neutral or positive, and a weight to determine the impact. Only reports with a negative sign contribute toward the health scores.

These signs and weights can now be customized for each project, allowing you to prevent reports from being shown as errors and from contributing to the health score by changing their sign to neutral or positive. Alternatively you can adjust the weight of the reports so they have a smaller impact on the health scores and appear lower in the prioritized list of errors.

The adjustments will be applied to future crawls and will not affect the project's historical health scores.

You can access these settings in Step 4 of the crawl setup, using the ‘Adjust Report Weights’ button. Watch a step-by-step guide here.

Screenshot of Step 4 of the Lumar crawl setup process with the Adjust Report Weights button highlighted.

Enhanced Broken CSS, JS and Image Links Reports

Release Date: December 5th 2023

We’ve implemented a fix to improve the accuracy of the broken links report, particularly around CSS, JS and image files.

The changes modify the existing conditions upon which we report on broken CSS, JS and images. This modification ensures that these reports now include CSS, JS and image files that do not have the standard file extensions (e.g. .js or .css) or content type (e.g. text/css). This change means we now include those resources, provided they are linked through subsequent resource links. For example:

<script type="text/javascript" src="[URL]"></script>

<link href="[URL]" rel="stylesheet"/>

This fix enhances the reporting capabilities of the Lumar platform, providing users with a more thorough and accurate assessment of broken links in web crawls, specifically addressing the nuances associated with CSS, JS and image files.

For this fix, we’ve added the following new metrics to all Pages reports:

  • CSS Links in Count
  • JS Links in Count
  • Img Links in Count

This fix affects the following reports, which means you may see some spikes or dips in your next crawl:

  • Broken CSS
  • Broken JS
  • Broken Images

New Hreflang Validation Reports

Release Date: December 5th 2023

We have added 3 new reports to flag issues with hreflangs. The reports will impact the Internationalization and Discoverability health scores.

  • Pages with Multiple Hreflang Langs In. Pages with hreflang links in from other pages that have inconsistent language codes.
  • Hreflang and Page Language Conflict. Hreflang links where the language code specified in the hreflang attribute does not match the identified language of the target page.
  • Invalid Hreflang Attributes. Hreflang attributes where the language specified in the hreflang attribute is not an ISO 639-1 code or the country specified is not a valid ISO 3166-1 code.

The new reports will be available in the Internationalization subcategory, in the Discoverability. Please note that the reports will be available once a new crawl completes.

Deprecated Unlinked Paginated Pages Report

Deprecation Date: December 5th 2023

As mentioned back in September, the Unlinked Paginated Pages Report was marked for deprecation as Google stopped supporting pagination detection from rel next/prev tags. This report has now been deprecated from the platform, which will affect health score calculations.

Find out more about deprecated and changed reports in Lumar.

Feedback

As always, we’re keen to hear your feedback to help us improve the Lumar platform. You can do this very easily by clicking on the smiley face in the bottom left-hand corner of any of our apps.

Animation of the feedback option in the bottom left corner of the Lumar platform, showing clicking on the smiling face, giving a rating and adding a comment.