Accessibility Testing
As a content creator and editor, you are responsible for ensuring the content you provide meets accessibility standards.
Post-launch accessibility testing with Siteimprove
After you launch your site and the content is live, it's important to maintain the accessibility of your site content.
- If you haven't already, request Siteimprove Website Scanning & Monitoring
- Designate someone to check site scores.
- Decide the frequency. Consider checking once a month. If there’s a big push in content writing, check scores a week afterward.
- It’s easiest to find issues from a big push if you can see how the numbers change. Consider recording numbers of issues, scores, etc. in a spreadsheet, and add to it each month. Here's a template for capturing Siteimprove results.
- Review the documentation for addressing some Siteimprove-specific accessibility issues using Stanford Sites.
- Ask questions at ODA office hours. You can sign up at https://stanford.link/soda-help.
Tools for testing accessibility
Built-in accessibility checkers
All Stanford Sites have two built-in accessibility checkers. One within the WYSIWYG editor, and one that displays when you're logged in and viewing a page. To learn more about these, go to Accessibility Checkers.
Page-level testing
A simple way you can check the accessibility on an individual page is by using browser plugins and online accessibility tools.
Learn more about accessibility plugins and tools from the Office of Digital Accessibility
Site-wide monitoring and testing
As part of the Stanford community, you have free access to Siteimprove, an accessibility and quality assurance platform to scan and monitor your website.
Siteimprove scans a site approximately every 5 days. If you've made changes to your site and want to check results immediately, browser plugins will check accessibility on the current page.
Learn more about accessibility plugins and tools from the Office of Digital Accessibility
Manual accessibility testing
Many accessibility issues cannot be detected with an automated tool. For more comprehensive accessibility testing, you may want to consider manual testing on all or part of your site.