Change log

Silktide Monitor is regularly updated with minor changes and bug fixes. We record these here. Not all changes will affect all customers, and some are for beta features that are being tested for wider release.

8th December 2020

[FIX] Fixed bug where the Policy table exports would not include URL information for some media types.

2nd December 2020

[FIX] Fixed bug where disabled form fields were creating actions for missing hover states on keyboard tabbing.

29th November 2020

[FEATURE] Added admin-only option to re-enable some old report layout features.

19th November 2020

[FEATURE] Added an accessibility check to flag non-semantic elements inside HTML lists.

11th November 2020

[UPDATE] Updated e-commerce reports to Monitor v3.
[UPDATE] Updated Legacy Monitor reports to Monitor v3.
[UPDATE] Updated various help to match updated reports.
[FIX] Fixed bug where the URL for the Marketing overview was inconsistent, and clicking on “Marketing” in some contexts could fail as a result.
[FIX] Fixed layout for websites reporting zero accessibility issues.
[FIX] Fixed bug where v3 reports couldn’t change their keywords.
[FIX] Fixed bug where Uptime panel could be shown if an account didn’t have Uptime configured. Now Silktide explains you should set up Uptime first.
[FIX] Fixed some layout issues with very old reports.

10th November 2020

[FEATURE] A new report structure (Monitor v3) is now set by default. This breaks reports up by Content, Accessibility, Marketing, User Experience, and GDPR. The new report includes several new screens, including Amount of Content, Content Accessibility, and Content SEO.
[FEATURE] Refreshed layouts for many report screens. Summaries now contain extra information that previously required more clicks to access. For example, it is possible to jump directly into spelling errors on a page by clicking the new “View pages” button below the chart of spelling issues over time.
[FEATURE] The Ranking screen (previously “Keywords”) has been substantially expanded. This now shows a graph of your overall keyword rankings, as well as of individual keywords. You can now view a list of your top ranking competitors, and review the keyword rankings of all of your competitors.
[FEATURE] The Adverts screen has been substantially expanded, and now includes a list of the strongest advertisers for all of your keywords. You can dive into any advertiser to view all of their adverts. Advertisers without websites are now supported.
[FEATURE] If a website doesn’t specify competitors manually, Silktide will now guess 5 competitors based on what websites rank highest for the keywords provided for the website. This information is uses for the Popularity screen.
[FEATURE] Many screens now show an overall “progress” gauge which shows progress towards completion in a given area.
[FEATURE] The Uptime screen now graphs of the % of uptime and the average response time for the past 6 months. These charts are available for both individual checks, and across all checks.
[FEATURE] Accessibility issues can now be filtered by the modality they most likely impact, e.g. “visual”, “auditory”, “motor”, “cognitive”.
[CHANGE] The icons for priorities have been redesigned to have distinctive shapes (e.g. top priority is a circle, second is a triangle, third is a square, and so on). This removes the dependency on colour to discern this information.
[CHANGE] Some colors and layouts have been refined.
[FIX] Fixed issue where some historical charts could contain an impossible value, such as a negative score.

14th September 2020

[FEATURE] Added the ability to view WCAG 2.0 and WCAG 2.1 results simultaneously for a single website, via a new filter in the top-right corner of the Accessibility overview. New scores for WCAG 2.0 have also been added to Leaderboards. This feature is only available if the account is not currently set to use only WCAG 2.0.
[CHANGE] Split the “Ensure pages don’t scroll in two dimensions on small screens” check into two. Previously this check could flag pages which didn’t appear to horizontally scroll when loaded, but which still required horizontal scrolling to be read, due their extreme zoom. To reduce confusion, this is now a separate check: “Ensure pages don’t require zooming and 2D scrolling on small screens”. This change could cause some Accessibility scores to change slightly.
[FIX] Fixed broken pagination on the Pages tab of the Broken links screen.
[FIX] Fixed readability from showing a never-ending loading spinner. This usually would happen if a website doesn’t contain any English (as the Readability test currently only understands English).
[CHANGE] The two “Check if an error mechanism is required” checks (3.3.4 and 3.3.6) now have slightly different names: “Check if an error prevention mechanism is required (for legal, financial, data)” and “Check if an error prevention mechanism is required (for all forms)”. These two manual checks are almost equivalent, but apply to WCAG AA and WCAG AAA respectively.

14th July 2020

[FIX] Fixed issue where some missing file checks wouldn’t run as expected. As a result of this fix, scores may decrease on websites that were affected.
[FEATURE] Overview digest for website managers to get an idea weekly or monthly on the performance of the websites they are responsible for.
[FEATURE] Monitor digest to provide a weekly or monthly uptime percentage with incident reports during that period.

25th June 2020

[FIX] Fixed issue which falsely reported 60 character meta descriptions having issues. This should only start reporting on the 61st character.
[FIX] Resolved issue with CMS plugins potentially causing the platform to become unstable.

17th June 2020

[FIX] Fixed issue where the SEO fundamentals test wouldn’t report issues with alt text inside links, but Accessibility would.
[FIX] Fixed the Inspector not working for some old reports, including Snapshot and Builder reports.

10th June 2020

[FEATURE] Detect common forms of lazy-loaded images as though they were scrolled into view.
[FEATURE] Automatically detect and dismiss more cookie banners.
[CHANGE] The text “previous” and “next” (and similar variants) is no-longer assumed to be deprived of context when analysing whether link text is accessible. In some cases, this link text is acceptable.
[FIX] Fixed an issue where the “Skip to content” check could be confused by broken fragment links that appeared before the real “Skip to content” link, e.g. inside a cookie banner with a broken link.
[FIX] Fixed an issue where alternative text would not be flagged as missing or weak for data-encoded images (i.e. images with a URL beginning data://).
[FIX] Removed duplicate alternative text check, that could appear under SEO fundamentals for some customers.

22nd May 2020

[FIX] Fixed some reports not exporting to PDF.

18th May 2020

[FIX] Fixed issue where the manually specified “wait time” would be ignored if a cookie banner or popup was being dismissed. The wait time is now added after dismissing the banner or popup.

7th May 2020

[FEATURE] The Inspector now breaks actions into a hierarchy (e.g. Marketing > SEO, or Accessibility > WCAG A).
[FEATURE] Added simulations to the Inspector. These allow you to see a simulation of dyslexia, colour blindness, varying levels of visual impairment, and what search engines see.
[FEATURE] The Inspector has been redesigned to make it easier to see related issues and to jump to them.
[FEATURE] Performance has been improved overall.
[FIX] Fixed some uptime alerts not sending.
[FIX] Fixed issue where a score or percentage >=99.95 and <100 could be rounded to 100 in an email, suggesting something was complete when it wasn’t.

30th April 2020

[FEATURE] Added new video lesson for keyboard navigation.
[FEATURE] Added better logging to explain what happened if a website fails to test.
[FIX] Fixed issue where some tags in the user interface could disappear (e.g. “A”, “AA”, “AAA” under Accessibility).
[FIX] Fixed issue where some PDFs would not be tested, if they (a) did not have a .pdf extension or (b) were redirected from a non-PDF MIME type.
[FIX] Fixed issue where a manually defined “click selector” (e.g. to dismiss a cookie banner) wouldn’t have any effect.
[FIX] Fixed issue where grammar checker could interpret some dates in US format (month/day/year), even when UK English was selected (day/month/year).
[FIX] Fixed the website search not working once tags were added.

29th April 2020

[FEATURE] Testing websites is now significantly faster.
[FEATURE] Users can now tag their Websites, and search by theirs tags. This can be useful for organizing large numbers of websites. To use this feature, click the tag icon in the top-right corner of the summary of a website.
[FEATURE] Silktide now dismisses more common cookie banner plugins automatically.
[CHANGE] If a user is subscribed to a Digest for a website, they are no longer sent the old-style alerts when that website is tested. In future, the older alerts will be completely replaced by Digests.
[FIX] Fixed a bug where testing a website limited to either 1 or 2 pages would fail every time.
[FIX] Fixed a bug where some webpages reporting some SSL certificate errors could be tested as if they were working, even though we couldn’t download the page. We would then incorrectly flag these pages as missing titles, content, and so on, instead of highlighting the SSL issue.
[FIX] Fixed a bug where some websites couldn’t be added, because they used a specific anti-bot measure that held the connection but never responded to it. We now detect and handle this automatically.

27th April 2020

[CHANGE] Content search no longer supports HTML or mobile devices. This is in advance of changes to our engine, which will make the distinction between mobile and desktop devices irrelevant.

24th April 2020

[FEATURE] Added support for Digests. A Digest is a regular email that users can be enrolled on, which gives them a summary appropriate to their role. For example, there is a Content digest, and an Accessibility digest. Digests are configured under Website settings > Permissions, then click Digests next to a user. If a user isn’t there, you should add them first.
[FEATURE] Most emails sent by Silktide have been redesigned to be easier to understand, more useful, and to work in more email clients.

11th March 2020

[FIX] Resolved issue where some checkboxes were not being detected on Forms screen inside the Privacy module.
[FIX] Resolved issue with Content Security Policies stopping the visual inspector from loading.

3rd March 2020

[FIX] Bug fixes and reliability improvements, particularly when crawling large websites.
[CHANGE] Silktide now downloads pages in a different order, preferring pages with fewer characters in a URL first.
[CHANGE] When listing pages, Silktide now shows pages with shorter URLs first. Previously pages were shown in the order they were first discovered, which meant that new pages would always fall to the bottom, and the generated 404 page appeared at the top. The new behavior instead shows higher-level pages first.

24th February 2020

[BETA] Silktide now orders pages differently, preferring pages with fewer forward slashes first.

14th February 2020

Inventory tab now includes a list of all Alternative text, Headings, and SERP results if you subscribe to the Marketing module.

13th February 2020

Our PDF bookmark checker now categorizes PDF documents with 21 or more pages as long, rather than 5 pages previously. This brings Silktide in-line with Adobe recommendations.
[BETA] Added option for some select customers to export reports into PDF documents.
Fix some layout issues with reports exported to PDF.

12th February 2020

Fixed an issue where the use of some CSS gradients or images without a fallback background colour could be misinterpreted as not having a contrasting focus state.
Because <input type="file"> is not consistently rendered in modern browsers, we no longer check it for colour contrast. In most cases the appearance of the button cannot be reliably detected.
Our sitemap detector now looks for sitemap_index.xml as well as sitemap.xml. Although non-standard, this is widely used (e.g. by Yoast).
We no longer show the file size for documents where we don’t know the file size (previously, we would say “0 bytes”).
Slight improvements to the reliability of our resource downloader – this will better handle some websites which use anti-bot technology.

11th February 2020

[BETA] Introduced support for exporting a downloaded website into a static form, suitable for use on S3 or a generic file system.

10th February 2020

[BETA] Silktide now downloads and store all resources used by all pages. This will allow for many new features in the near future.
[BETA] Silktide the Inspector now uses stored resources where possible, meaning it continues to function even if a resource goes away.
The Inspector is now faster to load, especially where resources have been downloaded (above).
Fixed issue where a cookie with multiple paths was shown as separate on one screen, but was combined on another.
Fixed issue with “Ensure every page contains a heading” layout not loading for some reports.

7th February 2020

Fixed a bug where some obscure table headings might not be detected, if nested in a specific way.
Improved accuracy of weak alternative text detection.
Clarified and expanded the text for some error messages inside the Inspector, if a page failed to download.
Refined and expanded some accessibility help.

6th February 2020

The “Combine adjacent links with the same destination” check now flags links with more separation, so long as that separation doesn’t affect how the links would be read aloud by a screen reader.
By default, all new customers now have our v2 scoring and automated language detection enabled.

5th February 2020

When viewing text color contrast in the Inspector, there is now a link to experiment with the colors (“Get recommendations”).
Some text results now formatted more clearly in the Inspector.
Added support to detect Webit CMS.
[BETA] Added integration to edit Webit CMS pages.
Added ability to exclude specific parts of a page.

4th February 2020

Enhanced accuracy of mobile layout detection.
[BETA] Added screen to view all Decisions for a whole account.

3rd February 2020

Introduced new Accessibility Teaser reports, as used by the Silktide Index.
[BETA] New scoring system, as used by the Silktide Index. Customers will need to opt into this to use it.
Introduced new system (“Batches”) for batching up large quantities of website tests in one go.
Many improvements to Accessibility help.
Fixed issue which stopped Silktide from detecting some images having the same alternative text as adjacent text (Accessibility).
Added accessibility check for adjacent links with the same destination.
Detect third parties like Incapsula and Cloudflare blocking Silktide from testing a website, and explain when this happens.
Fixed a bug where if a website changed from a very old to a new report design, the Inspector could crash.
Added ability to re-test a website without downloading it again, allowing for easier migration to new report types.

2nd February 2020

Expanded help for many Accessibility checks.
Make the Inspector slightly faster.
Color contrast now breaks up issues by how strong their contrast is, e.g. “Very hard for lots of people to read”.
The Inspector can now highlight more elements that are hidden from view, by moving them into a visible position where necessary.
Spotlight search can now search by Account ID.
Fix an issue where some completely invalid links wouldn’t be flagged by the broken links check.

1st February 2020

Added more help to explain WCAG levels from the Overview screen.
Two accessibility checks (“Check images have been correctly defined as decorative” and “Ensure text placed over images or gradients has sufficient contrast”) are now classified as Notices (previously they were Warnings).
Improved the appearance of the “Check that each page has an appropriate title” check.
Expanded many help screens.

31st January 2020

Improvement to accuracy of Flash detection: a false positive from the use of a detection library has been fixed.

29th January 2020

Introduced detection of potentially broken links, i.e. links which point to just “#”.
Mobile accessibility checks have slightly more weighting.
Introduced a new check for “skip to content”.
Introduced a new check for tables without correctly defined headers.
[BETA] Introduced new checks for Build Quality. These include checking for poorly programmed pages, and deprecate technology.
More on the accessibility accuracy improvements.
Fixed issue where some desktop pages could be tested as mobile.
Introduced ability to aggregate multiple accounts together as an “organization”.
Now detects more commonly used “bad link” text.
Removed the name of the WCAG checkpoint from our list of Actions when viewing them outside of the Accessibility area.
Improved the accuracy of the mobile layout check, when a malformed viewport is used.

Changes before this date were not published.