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Using Siteimprove for Accessibility

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Siteimprove is Ohio State’s enterprise web governance platform to promote web accessibility, ensuring that everyone, regardless of their abilities or disabilities, can use websites and web apps. Web accessibility is determined by the Ohio State Minimum Digital Accessibility Standards (MDAS) and is governed under Ohio State's Digital Accessibility Policy. Web leads, developers, technical managers, and content contributors are required to maintain the accessibility of their websites and content.   


 

Accessibility Site Target Score

The Accessibility Site Target score measures your website’s progress to OSU’s specific accessibility goals. OSU’s goals reflect these site target settings: 

  • WCAG 2.1, Level AA
  • ARIA WAI-ARIA authoring practices
  • Issues and potential issues are part of the score 

Important Note: The only document type that Siteimprove scans for accessibility issues is PDF. Identified PDF issues are not included in the Accessibility Site Target score.  

Despite not being included in the automated Accessibility Site Target Score, all documents and media are required to be accessible. See Reviewing Documents and Media for Accessibility for more information. 
 

Accessibility Score vs. Site Target Score 

The Accessibility Score is used in the Digital Certainty Index (DCI) and measures how well a website tests against all WCAG conformance levels, WAI-ARIA authoring practices and Best Practices. This is commonly used for industry benchmarking. See What is the Digital Certainty Index (DCI)? for more information. 
 

Tip: The accessibility issues filter defaults to OSU’s site targets. If you want to go above and beyond, you can expand the issue filter and select Conformance AAA and/or Accessibility Best Practices. 

Prioritizing Issues

Siteimprove offers a variety of ways for users to prioritize remediation efforts. See the following articles:  

 

Accessibility: Working with issue filters 

  • Filter issues by level of difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert
  • Filter issues by responsibility: content writer, development, UX design, visual design
  • Filter issues by element type: Form, Headings, Images, Page layout, Links, Tables 

Accessibility: Working with Page Sections 

  • Identifies page sections through an algorithm that may include headers, footers, metadata or page content. Resolving issues in page sections commonly used in templates (headers, footers) could have a significant impact on your score as the issues may span across multiple pages.
  • For sites using Google analytics, shows page views over the last 30 days

Dashboard: Accessibility Priority Fixes

  • Groups issues by the following categories (per site):
  • Issue Summary (Top 5)
  • Issues on Most Visited Pages
  • Issues on New Pages
  • Template Issues 


Guidance on Dismissing Occurrences 

When reviewing issues on the page report, you have the option to dismiss occurrences as “can’t fix” or “dismiss as false positive”. It’s important to understand the differences. Review the guide: Accessibility: How to dismiss occurrences of accessibility issues 


Important Notes: 

  • Unit leads have the permission to dismiss occurrences. If you are not a unit lead and need to dismiss an occurrence, please work with your primary accessibility coordinator, web lead, or technical manager. The Digital Inventory Dashboard identifies the Web Leads and Technical Managers, and links out to the Accessibility Coordinator list.
  • Account owners can undo dismissals.
  • False positives
    • Make sure to review the article noted above as it has a checklist you should review before submitting a false positive.
    • Automatically routes to Siteimprove for review.
    • When the Siteimprove review is complete, users can see the resolution on the Activity page in the Accessibility Module.
    • False positives that are not approved negatively affect your site target score.
  • Dismiss as can’t fix: Issue is removed from Site Target calculation. This does not impact your accessibility score. 

Managing Documents and Media

Reviewing Documents and Media for Accessibility 

Aside from scanning PDFs, Siteimprove does not track the accessibility of documents. Ensuring the accessibility of posted documents is a critical component to the accessibility of your website. All documents and media should be reviewed for accessibility using Digital Accessibility Service’s Evaluating Digital Content for Accessibility guides.  
 

To help users manage the document review, two policies are available in Siteimprove that collect the documents and media for each site: 

  1. Global - DAS – Documents that need to be reviewed for accessibility compliance
  2. Global – DAS – Media to be reviewed for Accessibility Compliance 

User can easily view these policies under the Accessibility Policies section on the Accessibility Reporting Dashboard.  

Once accessibility of the documents and media is validated, in Siteimprove, users must use the Ignore match feature to indicate that the item has been reviewed and meets accessibility requirements. Once all items have been reviewed, the website will receive full points for the respective category in their accessibility score. 

PDFs Not Scanned

If you have PDFs that are not being scanned, review the article Why are some PDFs not being checked by Siteimprove? 

 

Externally hosted files and content 

If you host files or content at a URL that is different than the URL of your website (for example: fisher.osu.edu vs s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/...) these files will not be scanned as part of the site by default.  

To add these URLs to the scope of the Siteimprove crawler contact das@osu.edu.  

Accessibility Scoring at Ohio State

Web applications are scored using a composite approach considering the Siteimprove automated score, full manual evaluation, and assessment of reviewed documents and media. This approach demonstrates progress towards compliance, facilitates prioritization, and provides improved reporting metrics.  
 

Accessibility Reporting Dashboard 

Information about accessibility scoring is available on the Accessibility Reporting Dashboard. This includes a link to the report <go.osu.edu/dasinventory>, which is generated outside of Siteimprove. 
 

 Score Composition 

  • (45%) Siteimprove Site target score: This is the percentage of automatically detectable content issues that have been remediated.
  • (35%) Full Manual Evaluation: All websites must have a Full Manual Evaluation performed by an OSU approved evaluator.  This evaluation should be stored in the MyRME database.
  • (10%) Document Remediation: All documents must be reviewed for accessibility, as they are, dismiss them from the Global - DAS - Documents that need to be reviewed for accessibility compliance policy on Siteimprove.
  • (10%) Media Remediation: All videos and other media on websites must be reviewed for captioning and transcripts.  As this content is reviewed, remove it from the Global - DAS - Media to be reviewed for Accessibility Compliance 

Grade Scale 

  1. Meets Standards - 90-100% These sites are fairly close to or in full compliance; they should continue to be monitored for content issues and resolved as they are found. Sites without reviewed documents or media are unlikely to receive an A.
  2. Good - 80-89% These sites are still in decent shape but need attention.
  3. Fair - 70-79% These sites represent the lowest “passing” score and should be given priority for remediation.
  4. Poor 0-69% These sites have serious issues and are considered out of compliance. These sites are the highest priority for remediation. The absence of a full manual evaluation will push a site to this level no matter how it scores elsewhere. 

Recommended Trainings 

Ohio State Siteimprove recordings 

Additional Helpful Links