I’ve just pushed two updates to PBIR A11y CLI: a license change, and a new release that fixes a real detection bug and adds two features people had been asking for.
Starting with the license. PBIR A11y CLI was originally released under PolyForm Noncommercial, which meant free use for personal projects and learning, but nothing commercial at all, not even running it in your own day job. That turned out to be more restrictive than I actually wanted. Most of the people using this are consultants and analytics engineers running it against client work or their employer’s dev pipeline, and I don’t want to stand in the way of that.
So it’s now under [PolyForm Shield 1.0.0](https://github.com/Juls-BI/pbir-a11y/blob/main/LICENSE) instead. You can use it for personal projects and learning, same as before, but now also in your day job or freelance work, in your own or your employer’s dev and CI workflows, paid work included. You can modify it, fork it, and contribute changes back too. What’s still off the table is building or offering a competing product or service based on this tool, a paid or free accessibility-checking website similar to PBIX A11y itself. The line I’m drawing isn’t “don’t use this commercially,” it’s “don’t become a competing hosted version of the thing.” If that’s what you had in mind, get in touch about a commercial license instead.
On to v0.2.0. The most important fix is in tab-order detection. The rule engine used to treat any negative tabOrder value as “this was explicitly hidden,” a heuristic carried over from the legacy PBIX layout format where -1 is the documented sentinel for hidden. In the modern PBIR format, a visual can carry a large negative tabOrder without actually being hidden, for example a background shape inserted before anyone manually reorders things. That meant genuinely decorative-but-still-focusable shapes, the kind a keyboard user would tab onto and find nothing to read, were slipping past without a warning. The check now only treats the documented -1 as hidden, so those elements get flagged correctly.
Two features came out of the same testing pass. `–include-hidden` tells `check` to also audit pages marked hidden-in-view-mode, the drillthrough and tooltip pages that are skipped by default since users don’t land on them through normal navigation, but still reach them through drillthrough or bookmarks. And `–docx` writes the findings out as a formatted Word document instead of (or alongside) the terminal output, with an overall summary and a per-page breakdown, so it’s something you can actually hand to a client rather than asking them to read a JSON dump.
Check it at [GitHub PBIR A11y CLI](https://github.com/Juls-BI/pbir-a11y), release notes for v0.2.0 are [here](https://github.com/Juls-BI/pbir-a11y/releases/tag/v0.2.0).
