Better Accessibility and More in UI for ASP.NET AJAX R1 2018

To give you an idea of the measuring stick we used here, we specifically targeted passing the WAVE test with all of our components. If you're unfamiliar with WAVE, it's a web accessibility tool that gives us developers some sort of tool to determine accessibility. It was developed by the folks over at WebAIM and is a great tool to do sanity checks on the accessibility (a11y) of your applications. It does this with the Chrome and Firefox extensions offered on the WAVE site.

As mentioned on the help page of WAVE, the tool tries its best at checking compliance issues found within Section 508 and the WCAG 2.0 guidelines. Since Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX supports these two standards WAVE provides us with a good tool to check our compliance.

By the way, when I say that WAVE does its best I want to note a quick caveat: no automated tool can guarantee accessibility, only the human eye can help with this. So, while using WAVE is a great start you will eventually need to implement some human checks and balances.

Improving our WAVE Report

Coming off of our previous release we took a look at reported accessibility issues and where we stood with our support for WCAG 2.0 and Section 508. We realized that we could improve our accessibility compliance with a few of our most popular components (and some not-so-popular) to improve our WAVE report. Specifically we managed to improve:

• RadMenu
• DatePicker
• Pageview
• Spreadsheet
• MasterTableView

I should make a special note here that all of our other UI components not listed here are already compliant, just in case I wasn't clear enough 😄.

Thanks to these updates, with R1 2018 UI for ASP.NET AJAX is our most accessible release yet!

Browser Support

Between any one of our three yearly releases there's bound to be some updates to the major browsers that we support. As a part of this we discovered quite a few regression bugs that popped up across Chrome, Opera, and Edge. Making sure that our developers can feel comfortable being on the latest and greatest, we pushed to ensure that we took care of these regressions and improved our support for these browsers.

Tackling Other Important Bugs

Outside of the above we also tackled over 30 major issues that have been logged with Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX over the years. We also took the time to look inward and improve some of our processes and internal tooling to help ensure that we can serve up fixes and updates even quicker than before. Additionally, while you may not notice, we updated some of our components and their themes to improve the overall appearance of the components.

Learn More and Share Your Feedback

To learn more about everything that's new in Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX and all the other Telerik tools, watch our release webinar recording.

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We want to know what you think about these upgrades and whether there's anything we missed - be sure to let us know in the Feedback Portal or right in the comments below.