Hi @aklpl,
Sorry that you are running into trouble here with the plugin. For the Facebook link specifically, I took a look at your site, and I do see that it is an empty link. An empty link is one that has no discernible text in it, either visual text or screen reader text (not a link that is missing an href value). You should add some text inside the link to make that go away.
As for the items that are found by the scan but not detected when you view the page with the frontend highlighter – seeing that message does not mean it’s a false alarm, a lot of items are not visible or hidden by CSS. Sometimes it is for an item no longer present and when that is the case if you rescan the page that issue should go away as it is ‘solved’ in the sense that it can’t be seen anymore.
Let me know if the issues go away when you rescan the page or not.
If you have any other questions feel free to ask them here and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
Thread Starter
aklpl
(@aklpl)
Hi @williampatton ,
Thanks for your response and for the Facebook link; I will double check those empty links. Most of them are probably image links, then, that I will need to add alt text or something else to (I will check the documentation suggestions).
I am still seeing some errors, though, that I have either corrected or that are no longer on the page (such as for past events), even after refreshing and rescanning the page.
For example, our Services tool has a mind of its own and uses H6s where H3s should be. I added a find and replace plugin so I could easily adjust the code. If I view the page source, I can see that my replacements worked (the incorrect H6s are replaced with H3s), but I am still getting an error saying that an H6 is present.
I am not sure, though, if it takes a few days for the Accessibility Checker to register some things? I feel like when I did my first trial H6 replacement, the scanner did not “notice” until several days later (I thought my correction had not worked).
This is the current error I am seeing that has already been corrected to be an H3 (as can be seen in the page source code):
<h6 class="sc_services_item_title"><span class="sc_services_item_label">Reserve Rooms / Study Spaces</span></h6>
Hey @aklpl,
Sorry for the delay replying here, we were closed yesterday for a public holiday.
I remembered at the weekend though that you are using WP Bakery on a different site, are you also using that here? I am curious if the scanner is no longer working for that builder anymore and will investigate that a little on my side, but if you can confirm if you are using it here or not that would be good.
My ony suggestion currently for you is to use the standard block editor and using the ‘Clear Issues’ button. That will delete all issues for the post you are editing (including ignores so don’t press the button if you have a lot of ignores). Then when you rescan it should find only the current issues.
The scanner really should find the issues as soon as you save the post and clear out any issues it no longer sees. The fact that is not what happens for you does indicate there is a problem somewhere along the lines. If you can share some info about the plugins you have on the site that would be good so I can reproduce a similar environment.
Thread Starter
aklpl
(@aklpl)
Hi @williampatton ,
No worries; things are busy here, too.
I ran a scan when I got into the office, and the H6 to H3 correction I made has finally registered. Not sure if it was some kind of cache delay? (Even though I did attempt to clear my caches.) That might make it tricky for me to know if a correction is working or not, but checking the page source after a correction might help me know if an adjustment worked.
Yes, we do have WPBakery on this site. Some of our other plugins are:
- Accessibility New Window Warnings
- Clicky for WordPress
- Disable Gutenberg
- Essential Grid
- Event Tickets Plus
- A few Gravity Forms plugins
- MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress
- NinjaFirewall (WP Edition)
- Real-Time Find and Replace Pro
- The Events Calendar Pro
- ThemeREX Addons
- WPCode Lite
I am trying to use Real-Time Find and Replace Pro to correct code that I cannot locate but is causing issues. We used to have LiteSpeed Cache, but recently it was causing issues on the frontend of our site for our events — it was not updating properly and was showing old events. It was not obvious to anyone logged in to the site as an admin — it looked normal there — but website visitors would see old events. We should have to purge the cache to correct the issue. We deleted that plugin because of the problems.
Perhaps that was also causing an issue for the Accessibility Checker, and that is why it was “seeing” old events? I will try to make some more adjustments and see what happens now that we do not have LiteSpeed Cache.
Hi @aklpl,
Once again apologies for the delay getting back to you here. I think the lightspeed cache was probably the culpriate for not being able to detect changes as you made them.
We have recently released some plugin changes that should improvove the reliability of the scanner and the speed which it can scan pages. I wanted to ask if you had recently found the plugin to be more reliable at finding your fixes or not.
Thread Starter
aklpl
(@aklpl)
Hi @williampatton ,
Good to know about the lightspeed cache plugin — that seemed to be problematic in multiple ways, unfortunately.
Current reliability of the Accessibility plugin is so-so. I fixed 3 sitewide errors recently; if I create a brand new page, the old errors are gone (I am down to 9 errors I need to address), but on pages that already existed before I made those 3 fixes, the errors still show up in the Summary and Details of the Checker, though attempting to view those errors on the page yields more “element not found on page” errors. To clarify, this error is different from the one that states that an error is “not visible; try disabling styles.”
I hope this makes sense!
Hi @aklpl,
I can chime in here. For performance reasons, Accessibility Checker is not running background scans on your site all the time. We don’t want to overwhelm your server. 😊
This means that if you fix an issue in a “global” area like a header, footer, sidebar, or theme code, the issue will still show in reports for existing pages until they are scanned again. In the free plugin, pages are only scanned on a save action or when they are opened in the admin editor. If you open the page in the admin it should trigger a rescan and clear your fixed issue. If not you can try hitting the save button to trigger a new scan. (We have an update coming soon that will add a scan button on the front end as well.)
If you have a large site, the Pro plugin includes full-site scanning which doesn’t require you to have to go page by page to clear issues.
If you open a post and save it, does that clear the fixed issue?
Thread Starter
aklpl
(@aklpl)
Hi Amber @alh0319 ,
Thanks for your explanation — that makes sense. Re-saving a page or draft does seem to update the error list, so I will keep that in mind.
I seem to have somehow “undone” two of my previous fixes, so I have to figure out what I did wrong there, but that’s on me, not the plugin. I am aggravated with our theme right now, but I’m not sure a different theme would be any better, so for now I will work with what I have. I am using a combination of your plugin and a find-and-replace plugin to try to fix errors, which might take a bit of time and trial-and-error.
I would say that your explanation resolves my current issue though, Amber — now I know why I had some errors that appeared to “stick” and why they were not found on the page when I tried to view them (they were fixed — I just needed a manual rescan to verify).
I am going to mark this issue as resolved and will reach out again if I have further issues.
Thank you both very much for your work on this!
Glad to hear that solved your issue. Have a great day!
