Siteimprove

Siteimprove is a web-based tool that crawls websites and reports back on quality assurance issues, such as broken links and misspellings, and accessibility issues measured by the W3C Web Content and Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

NMSU has created Accessibility Dashboards in Siteimprove to provide a quick overview of accessibility scores, issues, progress towards site target, details regarding compliance requirements, and instructions on how to prioritize remediation. You can also share dashboard reports via email and/or schedule reports to be sent on a regular basis.

The site target is a feature of the Siteimprove platform. The site target enables NMSU to display only the list of issues and potential issues that are relevant to meeting our accessibility compliance goal. If users are responsible for more than one website, you can view accessibility status, including points to target, for all sites in one view.

The accessibility score is designed to measure a website's level of accessibility, based on automatically and semi-automatically detectable accessibility errors. The accessibility score contains two categories of accessibility issues: WCAG conformance and Accessibility best practices. The accessibility score is comprised of 90 points awarded for WCAG conformance (Levels A, AA, and AAA), with the remaining 10 points gained for the use of accessibility best practices. The accessibility score represents your progress towards solving all occurrences of issues.

In practice, the accessibility score is calculated as follows:

1. SI divides the full 100 points by all the accessibility checks we provide. A, AA, and AAA issues have a higher weight than best practice checks.

2. SI looks at the number of all occurrences of each check.

3. SI calculates the number of unresolved occurrences of applicable code, for each check.

4. SI applies a logarithmic scale, to determine how many points you can gain from each remaining occurrence. Applying a logarithmic scale means that the number of points you can gain for solving each remaining occurrence will increase once you get closer to the finish line.

Note: PDFs with accessibility issues do not impact your site’s Accessibility Score.

NMSU has a subscription to Siteimprove with unlimited seats. If you need a Siteimprove account, please submit a request here: https://help.nmsu.edu/TDClient/267/Portal/Requests/ServiceDet?ID=4003

Accessibility best practice checks are related to content and code that have a significant impact on user experience but are not covered by WCAG. These include best practices that have been adopted by experts within the accessibility development and design community as an extension of the published web content accessibility guidelines. The best practice checks are incorporated into the accessibility score because these have shown, through feedback from real users, to have a significant impact on user experience. The checks are designed to guide designers, developers, and content contributors in implementing accessible code and content correctly and consistently.

Siteimprove checks for the most common accessibility issues in PDFs that can be identified by automated testing. Only PDFs of 20MB or under will be checked.