June 2026 Newsletter: Focus appearance audit, agentic scanning, white-label reports, and the world's fastest scanner
Welcome back to the A11y Pulse newsletter! May was a little disappointing with the ADA Title II compliance deadline being pushed back, but June brought some positive developments: the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen ordered Carrefour France to make carrefour.fr and its mobile app fully accessible within six months, with daily financial penalties after that. What makes the ruling so significant is that while Carrefour argued that it already met 71% of the accessibility criteria, the court ruled that an e-commerce site cannot be only somewhat accessible; it must be totally accessible.
Deque has a good write-up of the decision as well as a broader one-year retrospective on the European Accessibility Act (EAA). The highlights for me are that Germany has hired around 70 accessibility auditors and that Poland, Sweden, Ireland, and the Netherlands are all planning larger-scale monitoring over the summer. The quiet period that followed the EAA’s arrival last year appears to be well and truly over.
June was our biggest month yet at A11y Pulse, with a brand new audit, a major upgrade to our MCP server, a much-requested feature for agencies, and a behind-the-scenes look at the engineering that makes it all fast. Let’s dive in!
New audit: Focus Appearance
Automated accessibility tools have historically struggled to test focus indicators, which are the visual cues that show keyboard users where they are on a page. Static analysis engines like axe-core can’t reliably trigger an element’s focus state, so this entire category of issues has traditionally been left to manual testing. This month we launched our Focus Appearance audit to change that. Every A11y Pulse scan now tabs through the focusable elements on your pages exactly like a keyboard user would, and flags any interactive element that shows no visible change when it receives focus, helping you meet WCAG 2.4.7 Focus Visible.
We have two follow-ups planned that I’m particularly excited about. The first is extending the audit to cover WCAG 2.2’s stricter 2.4.13 Focus Appearance criterion, which adds contrast and perimeter requirements for the indicator itself. The second is releasing the audit’s source code, because we believe better focus testing should be available to everyone, not just A11y Pulse customers. You can read about how the audit works in the launch post, or dig into the details in the documentation.
Find, fix, and verify with your AI coding agent
In April we launched our MCP server, which gives AI coding agents like Claude Code the context they need to find and fix accessibility issues in your codebase. This month we closed the loop. Five new write tools mean your agent can now add sites and pages, update site settings, trigger scans, and wait for the results. Put together, an agent can register a page you’ve just shipped, scan it, fix the violations it finds, re-scan to confirm they’re resolved, and prepare a commit for your review, all in a single session without you leaving your editor.
These new tools require extra permissions in the A11y Pulse API. Your existing API keys are read-only, so you will need to generate a new key to use the write tools. Andy wrote about why this workflow changes accessibility work on the blog, and the MCP server docs go into more detail along with some prompts to get you started.
White-label reports for your agency
If you run accessibility audits for clients, the report is the thing you actually hand over, so it always felt a little awkward that our logo and brand pink turned up on the cover of your work. We’ve added a new “Branding” section to the A11y Pulse settings page where you can upload your brand assets and specify a company name. These will be applied to both the downloaded PDF and the in-app preview.
White-labelling is included in every paid plan. Andy’s announcement post has the full details.
How we built the fastest accessibility scanner in the world
If you’re interested in the technical details of how A11y Pulse works, this month I wrote an in-depth post about the engineering behind our scanner. Our goal has always been to make accessibility testing part of your regular workflow, and that means scans need to be fast. Check out my full post on the blog.
That’s all for this month, and honestly it was a struggle to keep it this short. Thanks again for following along with our journey. I’m looking forward to sharing more updates with you next month.
Joseph