What's New for Release 7.3

What's New

• Knowledge Base
  We have created a Knowledge Base with articles on frequently encountered scenarios, and product best practices. Access the Knowledge Base by using the same login credentials that you use to login to the products.

• Help Icon on the Main Toolbar
  The help icon has moved from under the Welcome dropdown menu into the main toolbar. The new Need Help icon is easy to find and navigate to the right help topic.

  

Experimental View

• Upload Issues Manually
  Use the Upload Issues option in the Scan Overview page (Experimental View) to upload issues manually to your run so that they are saved in axe Monitor . The Needs Review issues will be excluded in the uploaded issues. You can select only JSON files generated using axe DevTools Pro (Saved Test and Issues option) to upload. The maximum size of the file can be 10 MB, and you can only upload a maximum of 20 files at a time. Note that the axe-core version in extension to run the test needs to exactly match with the version in axe Monitor.

  Note: With the addition of axe DevTools Pro uploads, the option to upload issues from axe Expert is no longer supported. Your Deque representative will be getting in touch with you about the transition plan if you use axe Expert to upload issues to axe Monitor currently.

  These uploads are tied to specific scan runs. If the same scan were to run again, it won't include the manually uploaded pages. In the classic view, the information displayed will be equivalent to that available in the latest scan run on the experimental view.

• Update Scan Details to axe Reports
  You can now use the Update axe Reports option in the Scan Overview page (Experimental View) to manually update axe Reports with the latest scan details of the project. To do this, you must activate the More Run Options button and then the Update axe Reports option.

  This option is visible to the user only after the Include project data has been configured (enabled) in the axe Reports field in the General Project Settings page in the Classic View.

• View Multiple Scan Runs
  The Scan Overview page in the Experimental View displays the number of pages scanned for each scan run in the Runs section. This helps the user compare their scan runs easily.

  

• View Issues
  The Scan Overview page in the Experimental View has a new section that displays the details of issues based on the checkbox selected by you: Issues, Common Issues, and Needs Review. By default, only the Issues checkbox is selected.

  When you select the checkboxes, a list of issues with information such as the number of issues, the total number of unique pages scanned, and the WCAG rules applied is displayed. Clicking each link displays detailed information about the axe rule.

  Selecting the Needs Review checkbox displays only those issues that need to be reviewed by the user in the scan overview and that require manual checking in the scan.

  

Classic View

• Source URL Column in Pages Export File
  Page Source URL (the url for the page from where axe Monitor reached the current page) is now available as a column in the Pages csv export.

• New Authentication Types for Session Establishment Tasks
  Users can now select the authentications types NTLMv2 and NTLMv2 Session Security while creating an authentication session establishment task.

• New Setting to Run Browser in "Headless" Mode
  A new field, Run browser in "Headless" mode is available for users in the Project Administrator's Edit Scan Settings page in axe Monitor. Select this checkbox to run the browser in "Headless" mode, where headless mode is a functionality that enables the execution of a full version of the browser while allowing you to control it programmatically.

  

  Note: This is an advanced setting and requires technical knowledge of how your website has been architected. Change this setting sparingly, and only if you know that something in the code requires the browser to execute in non-'Headless' mode.

• Project-Level Dashboard Update Frequency
  If an issue is manually updated after the last scan run completed, the Project, Organization, and System dashboard screens won't be updated unless the Update now button on the Project Dashboard screen is clicked or the scan for this project runs again. This change has been made to improve the performance of the system to support a very large volume of scans running concurrently.

Bug Fixes

• Multiple A11Y bugs were fixed.
• Setting up a scan with Interactive mode enabled resulted in the page not loading in interactive mode and scans.
• Scanning pages using custom standards lead to pages failing intermittently.
• Scanning pages of a site that was not responding did not result in pages failing.
• Axe Monitor was scanning RSS feed files tagged/scanned as HTML, which it should not be scanning.
• The PDF violation description for incorrectly tagged links had an incorrect description that has been updated.
• PDF issues for 'Required field must be identified visually and programmatically', and 'Links must have alternate text' have been changed to 'Needs Review' severity because in certain contexts they require manual verification.
• Scanning PDF URLs that did not have an extension failed to scan.
• PDFs with `/` in the file name were not getting scanned. Organization Group members were able to create Projects through a workaround even when they were not Organization Administrators.
• Axe Monitor was not scrolling to the bottom of the page before scanning, resulting in some pages not loading completely before getting scanned.
• In the Classic View, the scan update to Axe Reports was not working when it was different from the previous scan by more than 50%.
• When the user tried to use any page that required the use of an organization or project selected, and then used a link to access it directly before selecting the organization or project resulted in an access denied error.
• In the Experimental view, the Scan Page Date filter accepted the '-' character incorrectly, instead of the '/' character.
• System administrators were unable to view all scans from the Experimental view.
• A few of the help links led to a "Page not found (404 (Not Found))" error for the Axe Monitor 7.1 user guide. The help pages were not accessible to guest users (users who had not logged into the system).

Infrastructure Upgrade

• Axe core upgraded to 4.7
• Upgraded RedHat to RH 8.6
• Upgrade Java 1.8 to include TLS 1.3 support (6297)

Deprecation Announcements

• With v7.3, multiple scans within a single project are not supported any more. If a project has more than one scan, only the latest scan is retained.
• With v7.3, uploading issues from axe Expert is not supported any more.
• Support for axe Monitor installs on RedHat 7.x support will be dropped at the end of 2023.
• With v7.3, SupervisorD is no longer required for Linux installs. Monitor will use the default process manager SystemD. Logs for services are now stored in JournalD.

Known Issues

• If a scan is triggered in 'headful' mode (chromedriver setting headless:false), PDF documents are sometimes not scanned by axe Monitor. This is a browser behavior issue where Google Chrome opens the PDF document as a web page in the browser PDF viewer.
  Workaround: Upgrade to Chrome and Chromedriver to the latest version. Upgrade the axe DevTools CLI to 4.6+. Contact Deque HelpDesk for support.
• If a user logs directly into the new experimental view (using bookmarked link, for example), and then tries to navigate to the classic view, an authentication error is displayed.
  Workaround: Refreshing the screen removes the error message and displays appropriate data.

Platform Support Matrix

The following matrix describes the operating system and database combinations on which axe Monitor is actively tested and best supported.

Axe Monitor Version	Operating System	Database
v7.3.0	Rocky Linux 8, Windows 2016,Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.x, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x	MySQL 8.0, MS SQL Server 2019, MS SQL Server 2016