One year in CAAT: Since October 2025 a lot has happened

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Our last Update Notes are from October 2025. Since then, CAAT has grown quite a bit. In this article you will find the most important changes.

More than 230 tickets across 36 deployments and a major PDF study (DE) – admittedly, we didn’t have much time to write about new features and improvements. We’re making up for that now.

Here are the most important updates from the past 12 months, grouped by CAAT’s main areas: automatic scans, PDF documents, and manual testing. If you want all the details, you’ll find the complete list of changes in the Update Notes from September 30, 2026.

Automatic Scans – Monitoring That Runs on Its Own

Accessibility isn’t something you achieve once and then check off. Websites change every week, and every change can introduce new barriers. That’s why one of our priorities was to evolve CAAT from a testing tool into a monitoring tool.

Repeating Scans 

Set how often a website should be checked, and CAAT takes care of the rest. Schedules can be set at various intervals (including monthly or yearly) and can be paused at any time.

Trend Display 

Once there are multiple scans, you can see at a glance whether things are getting better or worse. That makes it easy to demonstrate progress to leadership and other departments.

A Clear Overview with All the Details 

The overall overview shows the status of the checked pages and documents at a glance. The results of the automatic scans are broken down step by step into websites and PDF documents. For each checked page or PDF, you can then examine the specific problems and errors.

Free Crawling 

Not every website has a clean sitemap. CAAT can explore websites without a sitemap on its own. You control which areas are checked and which aren’t using patterns (including regular expressions).

Further Settings Per Scan

  • Protected areas: Check pages behind a login. Besides username and password, other sign-in options are available (cookie, HTTP header, or browser localStorage).
  • WCAG version: Choose which WCAG version and conformance level each scan is checked against.
  • Limits: Stay in control of your analyses. For both web pages and linked PDF documents, you can set limits at which the scan stops or continues elsewhere.
Dashboard of an automatic scan showing various metrics. Next to each metric is an up arrow, a down arrow, or a hyphen to visualize the trend.
Overview of an automatic scan

PDF Inventory for Large Document Collections

Many public agencies have thousands of PDFs online, and hardly anyone knows how accessible those documents really are. This is where CAAT has seen the most progress.

Document Metrics at Every Level 

PDF check results are now available not only per audit but also summarized for entire projects. Key figures show at a glance how many documents were checked, how many are PAC-conformant, and which errors occur most often.

Where Do the Problems Come From 

CAAT analyzes which programs were used to create the PDFs. That way, you can see, for example, whether documents from a particular specialized application or Office version consistently fail. This is often the most effective lever: instead of fixing individual files, you fix the problem at its source.

Filter, Sort, Export 

The PDF list can be filtered by creator program, modification date, and failed checks. You can see which pages link to a document and export faulty documents in bulk, for example as a to-do list for your editorial teams.

Table of creator and producer combinations, including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Word, or Adobe Acrobat and Adobe PDF Library. For each combination, the percentage share is shown, along with whether the PDFs are PAC-conformant, contain errors, or are untagged.
Table of creator-producer combinations in PDF documents

Manual Testing and Reports 

Automatic tests only find some of the barriers. For manual testing, we focused mainly on methodology and reports.

"Issues" Are Now "Findings"

When testing for accessibility, you encounter both errors and recommendations. Since the very first day of CAAT’s development, we’ve been looking for a suitable yet compact umbrella term. We borrowed "issue" from the world of software development, but for many of our clients, that word never really resonated.

In the English-speaking world of accessibility audits, the term "findings" is common. We’re now using it in CAAT as well, using "Finding" in English and "Fund" in German.

Better Categorization of Findings 

Findings can now be grouped by affected user groups and responsible roles. That way, editorial teams immediately see what they can fix themselves and what needs to go to development. You can create custom groupings using your own tag groups in the testing catalogs and assign them to findings.

Issuing Date and Status History in Audit Reports 

Reports now distinguish between the Evaluation period and the date the report was issued.

You can also enable a status history for a manual audit. Add comments when you mark the audit as completed, and include this status history in the report. This is useful if you need to provide a changelog for the audit.

Random Samples According to WCAG-EM 

Samples can now be marked as "randomly selected". This is reflected in the WCAG-EM export and in the audit report.

New PDF Export Generation 

The PDF export of audit reports is now generated using a new technology: a more stable foundation, cleaner layout, and fewer headaches when it comes to tagging the generated PDF export.

Section “Details on the Results” with three lists: Errors Found, Errors by Responsible Role, and Findings by Affected User Group.
The report provides a clear breakdown of the roles and user groups assigned to the findings.

Other Updates 

Beyond the major areas of automatic scans and manual testing, there were further improvements and bug fixes, such as:

  • improved handling of invitations to organizations,
  • corrections to catalog editing,
  • faster load times for large scans,
  • and much more.