There are many qualities that make a website great. Some are subjective, but others are not. Two of the most important objective aspects of our site are quality assurance and accessibility. Both reflect on us as a university, but more importantly, they can affect the experience people have when they visit our site. It can mean the difference between a student choosing to attend UA Little Rock or deciding to go somewhere else.
Quality Assurance and Accessibility
When we talk about quality, we’re mostly talking about the content that our visitors read. Is the content accurate, current, and understandable? Are there broken links, misspellings, etc.? Equally important, accessibility is about making sure that all of our visitors have access to the same information. Whether someone has vision problems, motor skill impairments, or any other challenge viewing web content, accessibility best practices help all of our visitors get the most out of our website.
One of the biggest challenges to both quality and accessibility is the sheer quantity of information a site like ours has. Fortunately, we have a number of tools that can make maintaining our site much more tenable. One tool we rely on heavily is Siteimprove.
Siteimprove
Siteimprove is a robust service that allows us to track both accessibility and quality assurance issues on our site. All accessibility issues are based around the WCAG 2.1 conformance ratings, WAI-ARIA authoring practices, and accessibility best practices.
Quality assurance issues include but are not limited to:
- Broken links
- Misspellings
- Readability (a page’s readability score is based on the Flesch Kincaid method)
Accessibility issues include but are not limited to:
- Missing alt text for non-decorative images
- Missing page titles
- Incorrect heading structure (H1 – H6)
- Text in all caps
- Overuse of italics
- Insufficient color contrast
Siteimprove crawls our site approximately every five days and generates thorough reports about what pages have issues and gives suggestions on how to fix them.
Currently, only a few departments on campus are regularly sent quality assurance reports but we are hoping to expand this to specified site owners in the near future.
Creating and maintaining a great website requires time and care, and having a site as large as UA Little Rock’s takes that to the next level. Fortunately, tools like Siteimprove help identify many possible content issues and gives us a real advantage in making the UA Little Rock website the best it can be.
This post was written by Adam Spelbring, Front-End Web Developer.