We’re happy to announce the release of Pope Tech – an enterprise-level web accessibility evaluation system based on WAVE. Pope Tech has been developed and refined for nearly a year. While Pope Tech is already being used by over 120 organizations in Higher Ed, K-12, Hospitality, Entertainment, Government, eCommerce, and the Financial industry, today’s release marks a significant milestone for web accessibility tools. This cost-effective, powerful tool is intended to disrupt the market and help organizations large and small significantly improve their web site accessibility for people with disabilities.
Pope Tech Features
Pope Tech offers the following features:
- Powered by the time-tested and popular WAVE accessibility evaluation engine. Based primarily on WCAG 2.1, the full power and educational resources of WAVE are incorporated directly into Pope Tech.
- Site-wide accessibility scanning and monitoring over time. Pope Tech takes the page-specific accessibility details of WAVE and makes them available for your entire web presence.
- Unlimited scans on any number of web sites! Pricing is based on the number of pages you want to scan, but you’re then free to analyze those pages as often as you need. You can be up and running with usable accessibility data in a matter of minutes.
- Unlimited users! Users can be assigned to customizable groups and will only see accessibility issues for pages that are relevant to them.
- Excellent support. Beyond useful and educational documentation on using Pope Tech and interpreting your accessibility scan results, the Pope Tech team will help you along the way.
- Unlike many accessibility monitoring tools, the Pope Tech interface is authored to be highly accessible to users with disabilities.
A Pope Tech user recently reported:
“We’re happy to report that we’ve cut our errors down across the board by almost two thirds with the help of Pope Tech. We expected the first moves to have major impacts but boy is that satisfying seeing the graph go down like that.”
We’re excited for the potential that Pope Tech has to help your organization in its accessibility efforts. You can learn more or schedule a demo at pope.tech.
WAVE Roadmap
It’s also an exciting time in the development of WAVE. We’re currently undertaking a notable update to the WAVE evaluation engine. This update will improve performance and accuracy. We’ll also be refining and adding new WAVE ‘rules’ or evaluation logic. While most of the new WCAG 2.1 success criteria are not testable in an automated way, we’ll be adding new tests to give feedback where possible on these new guidelines. These updates will initially be rolled out in the WAVE API and WAVE stand-alone API, and then in the online and Firefox and Chrome extension versions of WAVE.
With these updates in place, WebAIM will be using WAVE to collect broad sets of data about accessibility. We believe that getting a better sense of the trends and patterns of accessibility issues across the web will help us better address them in the future.
WAVE will also see a significant visual facelift. A cleaner, more usable interface is being designed, with slick SVG icons.
The future for WAVE and Pope Tech is bright. We’d love to hear from you about how we can make these tools even better.