It’s been a truly exciting year for accessibility at Jadu, especially this last quarter. Across the platform, we’ve delivered hundreds of improvements, introduced new tools to help teams create accessible content, and launched new products that place accessibility at their very core. Here is a deep dive into some of the projects we’ve been working on:
Accessibility isn’t something that happens once and is “done.” It’s a continuous journey, and one we take seriously. As part of our ongoing commitment to improving the accessibility of the Jadu platform, we’ve been continuing with technical audits across our products. With hundreds of user interfaces, states (e.g., loading states, error states, components, and interactions), the work is being done in phases.
So far in 2025, this has included:
At the end of each phase, improvements are logged and passed on to our product teams, ensuring that what we learn directly informs development.
The results of the above work are already visible in the latest versions of Jadu Central. Release 3.4.0 brought hundreds of accessibility enhancements to the core platform, with improvements to critical user journeys like signing in, password resets and registration flows, as well as refinements to directories, document pages, news, events and widgets. These improvements also benefit Photon customers as they are updated.
Jadu Central 4.0 pushes accessibility even further. The Control Centre has seen major refinements to areas like user settings and search results, with improvements to keyboard navigation, clearer screen reader feedback, better colour contrast, more meaningful page titles, and enhanced focus management in modals.
One of the highlights of Central 3.4.0 is the introduction of Sa11y, a new accessibility checker embedded directly into preview mode. Sa11y can identify over 80 common content issues, from skipped heading levels and ambiguous link text to tables without proper headers or links that open in new tabs without warning. By catching these issues before content goes live, Sa11y makes it easier than ever for teams to create accessible experiences for their users.
Alongside these updates, our design team has been working hard on a new out-of-the-box Photon theme: Origin. Built to conform to WCAG 2.2 standards, Origin goes beyond compliance by adding accessibility best practices into every area. Origin empowers teams to rapidly build and launch modern, accessible, and fully branded websites and digital portals, without needing specialist development or design skills.
Read our blog ‘Introducing Origin’ to learn more about the theme and its features.
Another big milestone this quarter has been the launch of Agent-Ex: Search. This is more than just a new product - it’s a new way of thinking about self-service. Instead of presenting users with endless lists of links or complicated chat functionality, Agent-Ex: Search provides people with what they came for: fast, accurate, and accessible answers.
From the outset, accessibility has been integral to its development. The interface is designed to reduce cognitive load, supports multiple languages, allows users to search by voice, and can even read results aloud in the same language. It already meets WCAG 2.2 AA, and we’re working hard to close the gap on AAA.
Beyond product development, we’ve spent much of this year working side-by-side with our customers on accessibility.
Our training ranges from introductory sessions that cover the basics of WCAG and accessible content creation, through to developer-focused workshops that dive into ARIA, semantic coding and JavaScript behaviour. We’ve also helped many teams with PDF remediation, ensuring documents are properly tagged and structured for assistive technologies.
Our audit service combines WCAG testing with real-world checks using screen readers, magnification software, and speech recognition. The findings are always summarised in practical, easy-to-follow reports that make remediation more straightforward.
This year, to mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), we invited customers to book 30-minute accessibility clinics on topics of their choice. The response was overwhelming, and the feedback we received was fantastic.
Conversations with those booked in ranged from technical WCAG questions and PSBAR exemptions to discussions on building accessibility programmes, creating champion networks, securing leadership buy-in and running empathy labs. It was excellent to see so many teams pushing accessibility forward.
Looking ahead, we’re thrilled to announce Accessibility Assist, the next evolution of our Jadu Assist browser extension. This new feature analyses content while it’s still in the editor, before it’s published, and highlights accessibility issues.
We’re launching with a link checker that flags plain text URLs, ambiguous link text and links that open in new tabs without warning. Soon, Accessibility Assist will expand to cover headings, tables, images, formatting and more, helping content creators catch and fix issues earlier than ever before.
The rest of 2025 will be just as busy. We’re continuing to audit the platform, implement shipping improvements, expand Accessibility Assist, develop new features, and support our customers through training, clinics, and audits.
Accessibility has always been at the heart of our mission, and this year has shown just how much progress we can make when we combine thoughtful design, technical rigour and collaboration with our customers. We’re excited about what’s still to come.