Checking Website Accessibility with Siteimprove

Accessible sites reach a bigger and more diverse audience, are easier for everyone to use, and comply with UC policy. Siteimprove is a cloud service that enables you to systematically review your sites for accessibility.

Sites are crawled on a regular basis – every five days – and reports identifying accessibility errors and how to fix them are issued to the site owner.

Reports

Siteimprove provides several types of reports useful for website maintenance:

• Accessibility: Problems with web pages and PDF documents in relation to the WCAG international standards.

• Quality Assurance: Broken links, misspelled words, and readability issues, including an inventory of your pages, documents, media files, email addresses, and other content.

• Search Engine Optimization: Technical, content, user experience, and mobile-related website issues affecting your non-paid search ranking.

• Policy: Style-guide violations or other issues (e.g., terminology, branding/trademarks, file sizes, page structure) based on industry best practices or your customized policies.

Getting Started

UC has a systemwide contract with Siteimprove that provides for unlimited users and allows an unlimited number of pages to be scanned.* To get a Siteimprove account and start scanning your site(s):

• First, ask everyone who will need access to your reports to login to Siteimprove to create an individual user account. (The UC account uses single sign-on.)

• Next, send an email to OIT with the url(s) of the site(s) you would like to have scanned by Siteimprove, and the users who need access.

• You will receive an email when your site(s) have been scanned, and the next time you login, you'll see your dashboard.

To get started, watch the Siteimprove User Training.

There's also a helpful starting page just for UC webmasters.

* Note:  Siteimprove monitors UC public sites only. To test password-protected sites, use the  Siteimprove Chrome extension.