Pope Tech release notes for 2025.
Want to know what has been updated recently at Pope Tech? You are in the right place. These release notes include all updates, including small updates and bug fixes.
The Release Notes include updates for both Pope Tech products, the Web Accessibility Platform (scan websites) and Canvas Accessibility Dashboard (scan courses).
Any questions or feedback don’t hesitate to contact us.
Feb 18th Release Notes – Web Accessibility Platform Updates
AIM Score Launch
The AIM or Accessibility Impact score is a score from 1-10 that combines automated testing with 10 manual tests across a 4+ page sample (How the AIM Score is generated). It is a tool to that helps organizations have a clearer picture of the accessibility across their websites in a way that is repeatable, measurable, and approachable.
Layering Automated testing, AIM Scores and full manual audits is an achievable way to implement web accessibility testing. Learn more about How your organization can use the AIM Score.
The AIM Score is available for all Scanning and Professional Plan account, requires the “Track Manual Testing” permission.
Getting started with the AIM Score
An AIM Score is created or edited through the Manual Tests view under Accessibility in the Main left side navigation or when editing a website from the Manual Testing Widget.
The first step of an AIM score is to create a 4 page sample.
Each Step or accessibility test has an AIM Score Assistant that helps you create your AIM score including accessibility training videos. The AIM Score Wizard can also be a useful training tool on how to get started with manual testing.
The AIM Score is not a complete manual audit but goes through 10 common tests that are each rated 1 to 10 along with the ability to leave comments. The final question is an overall ranking of the accessibility of the page after reviewing the other questions. We find that the typical page takes 7-15 minutes to test once someone is trained. Initially it will take longer as someone levels up their accessibility knowledge.
AIM Score report
The report view includes 3 scores, The Automated and Manual score which combine to create the overall AIM Score. The AIM score is also visible on the website view and in the Dashboard for Professional Plan accounts in the Manual Scorecard.
YouTube Caption Detection launch
YouTube Caption checking is now released as a feature that can be turned on in your organization settings and is no longer beta status.
YouTube Caption detection tests embedded YouTube Videos and links to YouTube videos to find out if the video has no caption track, automated caption track, or an uploaded caption track. This is valuable for finding and prioritizing the captioning of videos.
Results include:
- YouTube automated captions (Alert)
- YouTube captions (Feature)
- YouTube video missing captions (Error)
- YouTube video not found (Alert)
The old result of YouTube video (Alert) won’t show on videos scanned after turning on YouTube Caption detection and will be replace by one of the new results.
Review new YouTube Caption results documentation.
Other Updates
- Added ability to track website owners on websites (only available with Combined Crawl and Scan turned on).
- Added org and user timezone settings
- Fixed issue with adding pages to AIM score on some websites.
- Fixed issue with scanning behind authentication sometimes requiring you to reenter the password even when it wasn’t changed.
- Fixed issue with some external Result Detail reports that weren’t including the result HTML.
- Fixed issue where some websites were getting a ERR-999 error and not scanning.
- Improved edge case handling for YouTube caption checking where the video URL was encoded.
- Improved edge case handling for dismissed results with invalid html in the <head>
Feb 4th Release Notes
This release included the latest WAVE testing engine update with minor improvements to rule logic and significant performance improvements in loading time for scans. Assets that have no impact on accessibility are conditionally not loaded.
Web Accessibility Platform Updates
- Added support for YouTube Caption checking into the Inspect functionality.
- Fixed issue on a small number of websites where blocked host couldn’t be removed.
- Fixed issue with UI when adding more than 10 templates to a website.
- Fixed issue with code view and dismissing results when there is invalid html of a <noscript> tag in the <head>.
- Fixed issue with external reports with template content results linking to all results.
Canvas Accessibility Dashboard Updates
- Fixed issue with Accessibility Guide button location when editing a published discussion
- Fixed issue where Date picker was showing the wrong day of the week.
For additional recent updates view Release Notes – 2024.