WCAG and Site Improve

WCAG and Site Improve 

Below is an outline of how Our Organization approaches WCAG adherence, and how we use Site improve to research and resolve accessibility issues.  

WCAG 2.0 conformance levels

WCAG 2.0 guidelines are categorised into three levels of conformance in order to meet the needs of different groups and different situations: A (lowest), AA (mid range), and AAA (highest). Conformance at higher levels indicates conformance at lower levels. For example, by conforming to AA, a Web page meets both the A and AA conformance levels. Level A sets a minimum level of accessibility and does not achieve broad accessibility for many situations. For this reason, UC recommends AA conformance for all Web-based information.

The WCAG document does not recommend that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA success criteria for some content. See W3C documentation on Understanding Levels of Conformance and Conformance Requirements for more information.

How Our Organization uses Site improve to research and improve WCAG compliance

The Accessibility features of the Siteimprove crawler suite are used by the eCommerce and QA teams to track our progress toward WCAG compliance.  Issues reported in crawls are identified according to WCAG 2.0 guidelines, and in some instances one issue may trigger Warnings, Errors, or Review notices for the same issue, but referencing different guidelines.  This is based on context within WCAG itself, and how the user is interacting with a specific object, text, or function.  Up front, WCAG guidelines are a labyrinth that can appear to be difficult to solve, but once you learn how to drill down into different levels of reporting available within the Siteimprove tool, it becomes easier to navigate.

Issues

Issues gives us a snapshot where we still have Error, Warning, or Review type issues on different pages or sets of pages across the site.  BW is primarily concerned with A/AA adherence, and Errors and Warnings in our work in recent Sprints, so our default view should be AA conformance.

Within issues, you can research each issue type, regardless of where it appears around the site, according to how it is defined and categorised by WCAG guidelines.  This is helpful for high-level research, or to find all instances of a specific error across the site with searches or QA Policies

Guidelines

Guidelines provides, essentially, the entire WCAG 2.0 library for reference. You can drill down into specific issues from this page, but really it's geared more toward navigating, locating, and comparing different issue types within their separate contexts at a higher level, or studying multiple reports from different guidelines that cover the same issue to develop a comprehensive fix.

Pages

Pages is an alternate way of viewing issues, and allows you to review issues at specific page levels. This is a good tool for studying multiple types or instances of issues on a single page, but it is not ideal for higher-level research or identifying all instances of an error, itself

PDFs

Siteimprove sees PDFs as accessible, structured documents, so the tool regularly includes checks for PDFs on the site and determines their level of accessibility.

Currently we have resolved outstanding PDF issues, so there is no example to provide, but what it would be looking at is table headers, form labels, and other data that a user with accessibility tools may be seeing, hearing, or otherwise interacting with, and lets us know if they might have complications completing it

Validation

Validation is one of the most valuable tools for the QA and Dev teams because it allows them to scan the site's actual code and code libraries for issues instead of having to sift through pages and content

Html validation can be performed to find HTML errors.  This section of the site also allows you to view reports by URL that identify errors and provide insights on how frequently viewed/used the page might be

Siteimprove can perform CSS validation against linked CSS assets that have been detected during crawls

Validation is performed against W3C standards (currently 3.0)

Decisions

Issue-level

In some cases, we cannot fix an issue identified by SiteImprove because of the way our site works, the way our users access and use the content, or any number of other possible factors

In these cases, we have to determine a site-wide resolution, and apply it to the issue in SiteImprove.

This does not 'resolve' anything, we are basically ignoring the issue because cannot possibly fix it without causing additional problems or altering UX in an undesirable way

Decisions on specific occurrences

These are exceptions made for issues on specific pages.

Two examples of where we would and have used this, would be hotel details pages where hotels are responsible for overview descriptions, and TripAdvisor misspellings on the same page

Because we cannot control this content, we label it and it is annotated in the list of Decisions for later reference

Only admins or users with correct privileges can set or undo decisions, and once they are made, other users cannot access them or modify them in any way

Chrome Extension

A Siteimprove extension is available for Google Chrome, and can be downloaded here.