Published
April was an interesting month for accessibility. Just four days before the deadline for ADA Title II compliance, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) extended the deadline by another year, giving state and local governments until April 26, 2027 to achieve WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance. The DOJ has been open about the reasons for the delay, admitting that it “overestimated the capabilities (whether staffing or technology) of covered entities to comply.” While this does feel like disappointing news, the silver lining is that the extension does not suspend Title II’s nondiscrimination and effective-communication obligations, meaning that state and local government entities can (and likely will) still be sued during the extension period.
The last month was interesting at A11y Pulse as well, with a handful of improvements and new features making their way onto the app. Let’s dive in and see what’s new!
A11y Pulse MCP Server
It feels like agentic development has become fairly commonplace over the last few months. Initially we were reluctant to buy into the hype, but a proof of concept we built in March convinced us that an A11y Pulse MCP server could legitimately lower the barrier to fixing accessibility issues. The idea is simple: our MCP server gives your agent a ranked list of accessibility issues, along with the relevant code snippets and remediation instructions. The results blew us away: in our tests, agents were able to find the source of almost every issue with no input from the user. I won’t ramble on, but I highly recommend reading Andy’s blog post about the MCP Server as well as our documentation.
Scripting Secrets
If you’ve been using our scripting feature to test pages behind authentication, this feature will be welcome news. You can now store sensitive values such as passwords and API tokens as encrypted team-level values in A11y Pulse, and reference them safely in your scripts. Once a secret is created, its value will never be revealed again.
Static IP Addresses
One of our most requested features has been the ability to run scans from static IP addresses. This is especially important for sites that use bot detection or rate limiting. We’re happy to announce that this feature is now included as part of our Comprehensive plan. If you’re on the Comprehensive plan and would like to use static IP addresses for your scans, just reach out to [email protected] and we’ll get you set up.
That’s all for this month!
Thank you for following along with our journey. I’m looking forward to sharing more updates with you next month.
Joseph