ARC Toolkit v5 released

We’re excited to announce that ARC Toolkit v5 is now available! This release brings with it several big improvements, notably the update to ARC Rules v5.

Key improvements

• Utilizes the ARC Rules v5 engine Last October, we released ARC Rules v5, a complete rewrite of our rules engine with a much-improved ruleset and improved support for ARIA and iframes. This new version of ARC Toolkit utilizes the latest version of the ARC Rules engine so that you can scan whatever you’re working on right in your browser.
• Rewritten as a cross-browser extension
  The previous version of ARC Toolkit was only available for Chrome browsers which was great for Chrome users, but there are many browsers out there, and we wanted to make sure that as many folks as possible could use ARC Toolkit. So, we rewrote the extension from the ground up to be available in any browser that supports the Extension API. While initially available in Chrome and Chromium browsers like Microsoft Edge, we’ll be rolling out ARC Toolkit for Firefox in the coming weeks.
• View Results by Element
  If you’ve ever looked at the results of a scan and thought, “Hey, didn’t I see that same element flagged by a different issue?” then ARC Toolkit’s new “Results by element” view is for you. This view flips the results of your scan so that you can look at all the elements that failed one or more of our rules. This can be very helpful when trying to determine what solution you need to put in place to fix all the accessibility issues an element fails.
• Configurable Preferences
  Don’t want ARC Toolkit to tell you about possible Best Practices for improving your site? Still, focused on WCAG 2.0 Success Criterion? Want to ignore all the issues related to Contrast because someone else is focused on that? Then use ARC Toolkit’s new Preferences pane to set up how you want ARC Toolkit to report only the issues you care about. And since sometimes our needs change, you can always override your usual settings for individual scans.

At TPGi, we’re excited to share this release of ARC Toolkit with our clients and the community so that we can all make the Web more accessible for everyone.