Checking website accessibility with Siteimprove

Do you want to make sure your website is accessible to people with disabilities? Accessible sites reach a bigger and more diverse audience, are easier for everyone to use, and comply with UC policy.

Now UC personnel have access to a great tool – Siteimprove – to stay on top of web accessibility. 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.

Learn more in the UC IT Blog article, “UC Gets Systemwide Website Accessibility Checker.”

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.

Scanning Your Sites

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 sites:

• First log in to Siteimprove  to get an account. (The UC account uses single sign-on.)
• UC Berkeley users – please use the specific URL for UC Berkeley's Siteimprove instance.
• Next, send your Siteimprove location administrator a list of the URLs you want scanned by Siteimprove.
• Add a script to your site that helps you prioritize the issues to fix. If you don't have access to add the script to your CMS, contact your website/system administrator.
• Later, if needed, contact your location administrator to make any configuration changes to your site scans.

Using Siteimprove

Note: Siteimprove is primarily used to monitor UC public sites. To test password-protected sites, either

1. use the Siteimprove Chrome extension, or
2. follow procedures to request approval from your location admin to check non-public facing sites that contain no sensitive data.

Getting Started

1. Complete Siteimprove's Accessibility 101 Webinar (must be logged in to view).
2. Consider completing Interactive Tutorials, and more Siteimprove Webinars (must be logged in to view)

Information for Location Admins

Additional information is provided for designated Siteimprove location administrations in the admin guide.

Support

A lot of information is available in the Siteimprove app under the Help tab.

• Siteimprove Help Center
• Guides and Frequently Asked Questions

You may submit tickets to support@siteimprove.com.