Beta feedback: Audit panel

Hi all - thanks for trying out the Audit panel in beta. Please leave comments below if you discover any issues, have any questions, or need help in any way. We’ve also got a survey you can take to provide overall feedback.

Planned improvements

Today’s beta release is just the first iteration of the Audit panel. In the coming months, we’ll be making steady updates about what audits are covered and how to perform these checks, including:

  • Better in-product guidance. We’ll be adding a modal per audit type that provides additional context on each and provides guidance on how to resolve them.
  • Dismiss audits you want to ignore. Hide audits that you don’t plan to resolve or that aren’t necessary to fix for your project.
  • Support for more audits. We’re planning to add more audits to the future like text contrast, site language settings, and more.

Consolidated canvas settings

As part of this update, we’ve also consolidated some canvas display controls from the bottom left side of the Designer into the canvas settings dropdown at the top (alongside controls to change the size of the actual canvas).

The controls we’re moving are:

  • X-ray mode (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + X)
  • Hide and show element edges (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + E)
  • Hide and show empty elements (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + M)
  • Grid overlays (Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + G)

You can still access these controls quickly with the keyboard shortcuts listed above.

8 Likes

Hey @brjohnson, I’d just like to throw my hat in the ring here and say that I’m really not keen on the removal of view modes from the GUI. While I welcome the addition of the Audit panel, I find over-reliance on keyboard shortcuts to be pretty unintuitive for those that like a visual interface to interact with. I hope this is taken on board as constructive feedback!

EDIT: @brjohnson kindly showed me where they have been moved to on another thread - thanks, Barrett!

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Hey Andy - as I commented in the other thread, we haven’t removed these from the UI, they’re just in a new place (see screenshot in my original post on this thread). I’m not crazy about keyboard shortcuts either so I understand the concern! Hope this helps clear things up. And thanks for the feedback!

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That looks like a cool improvement. Thank you!

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Thank you for expanding all these accessibility features!

Quick Feedback
More specific comments could be helpful. I was a getting moderate error regarding a skipped heading level but I didn’t understand where the error was and how to solve it. https://wave.webaim.org helped me though!

2 Likes

This is nice but we need more important features like native multi-language support or an image cropper for CMS photos (eg: when uploading a blog cover image, the designer should be able to set an img ratio in the CMS field specs, and the editor would be asked to crop the img if it doesn’t fit that ratio.)

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This is a great feature. Thanks for all you do.

I think it would be great to have site speed and SEO suggestions in the audit panel too. Maybe 3 tabs.

8 Likes

This is for sure a cool improvement, thank you for that.

I use x-Ray mode A LOT, so I’m not happy about that GUI choice, hope to get used to it soon, or even better I’ll learn the shortcut once for all

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While I welcome features like these from the Webflow team, having been with you guys since 2015 until now; it’s becoming frustrating that some key features to allow us to create better sites are still missing to date. Not to mention features that help support clients that host with you guys.

5 years later, these are still not available neither signs of it being developed:
⨉ Table support for both Design mode and Editor mode
⨉ Pseudo classes support
⨉ Selective publish to staging (name.webflow.io) for Editors, only Designers can do so not sure why
⨉ Sudden removal of the ability for Editor to edit Link Blocks with nested . Until to date no answer or response to why this was removed nor a replacement of the feature
⨉ Multi-language capabilities

Webflow used to be a community driven tool, actual paying customers who really gets a say to what features matter. But as the years go by, I can see that changing and whatever that’s really necessary gets deprioritized or completely ignored. Sorry to say this but, it’s really frustrating and there’s nothing I could do. There’s currently no better tool than Webflow, I would just have to concede to whatever the product team decides.

4 Likes

I look forward to more finger-wagging the product will be doing at me.

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This is a major COOL feature!

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Hey @brjohnson,

I couldn’t agree more with some of the other guys here. This is a nice feature, don’t get me wrong, but why spend your dev resources on this when there’s so much more other critical elements to add to Webflow ???
We can get this information at far more deeper level from other tools.

On the other hand, we have fundamental requirements for which we, as users, have voted via the wishlist for years now that are still not there… and we can’t implement them easily or for cheap although they are standard features anywhere else :

  • Multi language was mentioned several times here already
  • Customer accounts (although apparently underway for next year)
  • Real time filters / faceted search
  • Adjustable Screen Height in Mobile Designer View
  • Ability to duplicate Collection Page
  • Change logs / Audit trails for Edits in Designer and CMS
  • CMS slider
  • Subscriptions available in ecommerce
  • More payment gateways in ecommerce

Sure there are expensive 3rd party solutions that were created addressing some of those, and great work from others in the community helped a lot too (kudos to @Finsweet and the others…). But there should not be a dependency created on the javascript they host themselves and no one can control (and could potentially break sites as Webflow doesn’t validate custom code).

Please Webflow Team, get your priorities straight again :pray:

7 Likes

This is a killer feature! Super helpful! Thank you!

It would blow my mind, if it helped me to set the semantic html elements right. :slight_smile:
or at least reminds me to do it.

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I LOVE the new audit panel. Thank you so much. The support materials that recommend best practices for such things as alt text syntax are hugely helpful.

I’m trying to be guided by the California web standards: Accessibility | Webstandards having this new audit feature is a good start. I hope you will expand and add such things as line spacing etc.

5 Likes

The audit doesn’t scan symbols for now. For example, it didn’t see missing ALT attributes inside symbols.

And I totally agree with other guys - Webflow, you have a strange priority of improvements what your fans needs. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: How many people asked about this audit feature anyway? And how many people asked about multi-language, customer’s accounts, better slider, better e-commerce features - things, which REALLY matter. Many more, I’m sure. So why you don’t listening to them?

Be aware to lose your fan’s love. :broken_heart:

2 Likes

This makes me so happy. I haven’t used it for more than 10seconds, but I’m the main driver for accessibility on my team; this will save me so-so-so much time, energy, and provide me with accountability tools for accessibility.

Thank you. :heart:

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This really is an amazing feature!

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Amazing feature! It put a spotlight on the accessibility of the web and I think that’s wonderful to see these things taking more seriously. It is also soo good for SEO and no one can hate that :wink:

I would love to see a list of text that don’t comply with the AA or AAA rating.
It would be optional to comply on that to respect the freedom so dear to our designer heart but you would see in one place all the instances that are not legible and it would help lots of designer pay attention to that kind of thing (it is in the cooler panel of type-setting but a bit of redundancy here would not be a problem I think :wink: )

Thanks you Webflow ! Great work !

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