We have a systemwide contract with Siteimprove, an automated tool for website accessibility, quality assurance, and search engine optimization (SEO). Any site owner can sign up for Siteimprove and begin accessing detailed reports that can help improve all these aspects of their site. Visit the IT Service Catalog for information about enrollment and training.
As a site builder for your Open Berkeley site, you have control over the content and structure of your pages, but not the templates or the underlying platform code. The Open Berkeley team tests all new features and updates for accessibility before deploying them. We have our own site enrolled in Siteimprove, and we monitor scan results for customer sites as well. If any site scan detects issues based on unanticipated uses of Open Berkeley site building tools, our team works to fix them as quickly as possible and deploys any fixes to all managed sites.
Understanding your Accessibility scan results
If possible, attend a Siteimprove user training or watch a recorded training before you begin fixing issues on your site.
Issues and Potential Issues
An Issue represents a problem that can be detected automatically. For example, an image tag that is missing the alt attribute.
A Potential Issue represents a possible problem that can’t be verified automatically and needs to be looked at. For example, two links that have the same text should go to the same destination, but the scanner can't verify this automatically. The Siteimprove page report will walk you through how to verify each potential issue.
Conformance levels: A, AA, or AAA
Our systemwide accessibility policy uses the WCAG 2.0 AA (“Double-A”) standard. This means that your website should conform to the level A and AA criteria. The AAA (“Triple-A”) criteria are the strictest; Siteimprove will show you issues at level AAA but you are not required to meet those standards. The Open Berkeley platform on its own has no issues at level A or AA. If you see issues at level A or AA, they are content-related and you will need to fix them in your site content.
Other issue types: WAI-ARIA and Best Practices
Open Berkeley site builders do not have access add or change any ARIA markup. The Open Berkeley platform does not have any WAI-ARIA issues, so we expect that all Open Berkeley sites will score 100 on the ARIA category.
Best Practices represent issues that are not WCAG violations, but are important for improved user experience and accessibility. For example, it is best if headings (H2, H3, etc) do not skip levels. This is not always possible on sites using Content Management Systems like Open Berkeley, where pages are assembled from templates, and widgets may appear in different locations relative to the rest of the content.
Frequency of occurrence
If you see the same issue identified on most or all pages on your site, there are several possible causes:
- Main menu, secondary menu, or footer content. Problems in these areas will show up as issues on every page; fixing the issue will fix it on every page.
- Reusable widgets. Fixing the issue on the reusable widget in one location will fix every instance of that widget.
- Content that has been copied and pasted into multiple pages. These issues must be fixed individually on pages where they occur.
- Site building practices that result in accessibility issues. For example, using headings for visual style instead of semantic structure. These issues must be fixed individually on pages where they occur. See our Web Accessibility page for tips on creating accessible content.
Open Berkeley score targets
Open Berkeley sites are expected to meet the following scores:
- WCAG A: 100
- WCAG AA: above 90
- WCAG AAA: Not required, but above 80 is nice to have
- WAI-ARIA: 100
- Best Practices: above 90
Getting help
Please use the Siteimprove Academy trainings (must log in via CalNet to your Siteimprove account), our own Web Accessibility page, and the instructions on your Siteimprove page reports to learn and to fix any issues in your site content. If you encounter an issue that you don't think you can fix yourself, please report it to us at web-platform@berkeley.edu and we will investigate.