Why won't your unique store design prevent users from leaving pages? The problem goes beyond your store's look. Ease of use and interaction matter, and customer satisfaction matters.
For that reason, we updated our Magento 2 themes and modules. The November monthly report summarizes improvements in user engagement and on-page interaction. Your products and services will be easy to access for everyone, especially for users with a disability or temporary personal situations. By expanding your reach, you will get new customer bases and generate higher revenues.
Jump into the details.
We start with significant updates for Argento themes. Our popular Magento 2 theme keeps being in demand due to its features, speed, and number of included modules.
Updates for the Argento template
Since November 2024, the Argento theme has supported the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standard more completely. We made some adjustments to help your Magento 2 store follow requirements for creating accessible digital content.
Accessibility updates at Argento themes are necessary for people with visual impairments, and for customers who look around the pages with only a keyboard. By making your Magento store WCAG accessible you increase the number of customers and sales.
Introducing Argento Breeze 2.50 and Argento M2 1.46 versions.
Key improvements are detailed in a dedicated article - Consider ways to make your store WCAG accessible for disabled people.
- Current accessibility requirements
- Steps to check your store for accessibility issues
- Steps you need to perform to follow WCAG requirements
- Great accessibility enhancements for all Argento themes and bundled modules
Here’s some good news for you. In November we added accessibility improvements also to Breeze products. See further down.
Updates for Breeze
Last month we released swissup/breeze 2.19.0, swissup/breeze-blank 2.9.0, and swissup/breeze-evolution 2.3.0.
Referring back to the main point - accessibility requirements, we took steps towards improving the user experience for people with disabilities. For Breeze Blank and Evolution themes we:
- Improved color contrast to pass WCAG tests.
- Improved navigation using the keyboard.
Now we turn to the improvements in SwissUpLabs Magento 2 extensions.
Updates for Magento 2 modules
Ajax Search Autocomplete 1.13.22
- Accessibility improvements for keyboard navigation.
- Fixed possible horizontal scroll in third-party themes.
- Fixed js error when using checkout layout with header and minicart and PayPal Smart buttons are rendered inside minicart dropdown.
- Fixed slow performance when compiling LESS files.
- Fixed incorrect version number in composer.json file.
- Fixed color contrast errors to pass WCAG tests.
- Fix: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading ‘match’).
- Fixed possible unprocessed deferred scripts on Safari.
- Simplified unpack script.
- Add varnish checking in the expire optimizer.
- Remove adding unnecessary 'defer' and 'async' in the defer js optimizer.
- Fix ignore by signature logic in defer js optimizer.
- Improved deferring logic for minified JS.
- Remove duplicates in code.
- Fixed getStoreIds.
- Added {pagespeed_asset_url} support to custom preloaded resources (close #70).
- Added ‘Generate critical CSS for the theme(s)’.
- Added View/Asset/PlaceholderReplacer.
- Breeze: Update breeze integration.
- Improved color contrast for the “bow” label.
- Added a title to the "View more" link.
- Allowed closing mobile sidebar when pressing ESC on closed parent item.
- Used the same navpro component in Breeze and Luma.
- Removed mage/menu dependency. Reduce js codebase by 10KB.
Featured Attribute 1.1.8 comes with a fixed color contrast according to the accessibility requirements.
Fixed accessibility error. Now it is impossible to use h5 without all of the previous levels.
Ask It 1.14.18 comes with fixed color contrast errors to pass WCAG tests.
- Fixed a11y contrast issues.
- Improved ability to use keyboard navigation.
- Fixed line wrap on laptop when using Amazon-like layout.
- Remove deferred CSS styles to reduce layout shift score.
- Improve navigation with the keyboard.
- Increased element size to pass accessibility tests.
Ajax Layered Navigation 1.5.25:
- Improved parseLocaleNumber in breeze price-slider.js.
- Added option filtering for 'single select' attributes.
TaxVat 1.4.6 fixed invisible country multi-select on the store level.
Well, we are done with describing November 2024 updates which create an easier interaction on Magento 2 sites.
You've got 45+ improvements and fixes for better performance, user engagement, and on-page interaction. You've moved one step closer to clients with disabilities. This all is about getting a larger audience and hence growing your business.
Drop us a line if you want to share your thoughts about recent updates. We'd highly appreciate your feedback as it helps to improve our Magento 2 products.