axe-core 3.3 is Here!

This week the Deque team released version 3.3 of axe-core. With this release, axe users will find new accessibility testing rules, improved performance, and numerous bug fixes. Read on for more axe-core 3.3 details.

New Rules

7 New Rules were added to the axe-core library:

Rule 1: aria-input-field-label

This new rule ensures every ARIA input field has an accessible name. Accessible names must exist for the following input field roles:

• combobox
• listbox
• searchbox
• slider
• spinbutton
• Textbox

Rule 2: aria-toggle-field-label

Ensures every ARIA toggle field has an accessible name for the following role attribute values:

• checkbox
• menuitemcheckbox
• menuitemradio
• radio
• switch

Rule 3: avoid-inline-spacing

The avoid-inline-spacing rule ensures that text spacing set through style attributes can be adjusted with custom stylesheets.

Rule 4: input-button-name

The input-button-name rule separates functionality from the button-name rule to ensure that input buttons have discernible text; advise relevant to input button names was incorrect for button elements.

Rule 5: landmark-unique

Landmark-unique is a new best practice rule ensures that landmarks have a unique role or accessible name (i.e. role, label, title) combination.

Rule 6: role-img-alt

The new role-img-alt ensures elements with the role=”img” attribute value have alternate text.

Rule 7: scrollable-region-focusable

The new scrollable-region-focusable rule ensures that elements containing scrollable content are accessible by keyboard.

For rules support, please refer to the List of axe 3.3 Rules page on Deque University.

Improved Performance

Changes to the codebase have significantly improved axe-core performance. There were several changes made to the code base and in follow up testing the team is seeing improvements up to 100% in the axe run execution times on large pages. One notable change was adding a cached result from the tree searches, which is an expensive search and saves considerable time

See axe-core 3.3 release notes on GitHub for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

Custom Rule Compatibility

Using custom rules? Please check out our new policy regarding custom rule compatibility and other backwards compatibility issues with axe-core: Backwards Compatibility doc on GitHub.

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