I have been using Xara for about 6 years, and really like the web designer program. Now I'm trying to bring my websites up to speed with making them accessible and compliant with the latest ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) and WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) requirements. Some things are obviously under my control like color schemes and image ALT tags, but there are other things getting flagged by compliance scans that seem to be automatically generated by Xara. Here are a few examples:

1. Every site I have created in Xara has the following tag embedded in it:

<!--[if gte IE 9]><!-->
<div id="xr_xr" class="xr_noc" style="position:relative; text-align:left; margin:0 auto;" onmousedown="xr_mm(event);">
<!--<![endif]-->

This generates a compliance error because not all viewers can use a mouse, so you have to have a handler that is keyboard friendly like "onkeydown" or "onclick". I cannot find how or why this code is generated, or how to change it.

2. If you set a line of text within a paragraph to be bold, Xara uses <span> tags with CSS font-weight property to do that:

<span class="xr_tl Quote xr_s3" style="top: 163.41px;">this is important</span>

But that is a WCAG violation because screen readers for blind visitors cannot convey that the text is bold/important.

3. When you apply a link to be opened in a new tab or window, WCAG guidelines say that it should have a title or aria-label attribute to warn that the link will open in a new window. Xara just generates the "target=blank" attribute without a warning, and there is no way within the program to add a title or aria-label to the link.

Since it is the law in the US that all government and business websites be WCAG compliant, these kinds of compliance issues that are generated by the Xara code pose a problem for my clients. Is WCAG compliance an issue that Xara is addressing? When could we expect an update that would bring the Xara generated code into legal compliance for US companies?

If anyone knows of work-arounds for these issues in the meantime I would much appreciate any guidance you can give me.

Thanks,
Summer Murphy
A Better Web, Inc.