May 2026 Newsletter: Teams alerts, our first industry benchmark, and a more powerful API
Last month I wrote about the US Department of Justice pushing its ADA Title II compliance deadline back by a year, and it turns out that was only the start of the story. On the 7th of May, the HHS Office for Civil Rights followed suit with an Interim Final Rule that extends its own compliance dates. Healthcare organisations and other recipients of HHS funding with 15 or more employees now have until May 2027 to bring their web content and mobile apps up to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, while smaller recipients have until May 2028. Their reasoning is the same as the DOJ: they believe a significant number of community health centres, hospitals, and primary care providers simply would not have been ready in time. It is becoming something of a pattern this year, and while the extra breathing room is welcome, the underlying obligation to provide accessible services has not gone anywhere.
It was a busy month for us too, with a new integration, the launch of a series we’ve been wanting to publish for a long time, and a meaningful upgrade to our API. Let’s dive in!
Accessibility Alerts in Microsoft Teams
A lot of you have asked us to bring A11y Pulse alerts into the places where your team already talks, and this month we added support for Microsoft Teams. This integration doesn’t require admin permissions in Teams, so anyone can set it up. When an alert fires, we post a rich message to your channel with a summary of the new issues and a link to the full report. Read the full announcement or jump into the documentation to get started.
Industry Benchmark: New Zealand Web Agencies
I’ve been wanting to write a series like this for a while, and I’m really excited to finally get it started. The idea is simple: we pick a sample of websites from a particular industry and perform an accessibility audit on each of them. The goal is to build up a picture of the state of accessibility across the web, and hopefully to nudge some poor-performing sites to improve. This month we turned the spotlight on our own backyard and tested 27 web agencies here in New Zealand. You can read the full benchmark on our blog.
A More Powerful API
In March we launched the A11y Pulse API as read-only. Just recently we have added 7 new endpoints that let you create, update, and delete sites & pages, and trigger scans on demand. We’re hoping this unlocks a lot of new possibilities for deeply integrating A11y Pulse into your workflows. The blog post has the full details, along with a teaser for some MCP server updates.
That’s all for this month. Thanks again for following along with our journey. I’m looking forward to sharing more updates with you next month.
Joseph