You asked and we listened – from today, Silktide Prospect reports can optionally include a lightweight accessibility test.
Accessibility is the practice of making sure a website can be visited by the widest possible audience, regardless of any limitations in their abilities. When mentioning accessibility, the example of a vision impaired individual using a screen reader to have a website’s content read out aloud is commonly cited. However, the field of study is much broader than that and includes many other scenarios – including physical disability, behavioural disorders and much more.
In many jurisdictions, having an accessible website is a legal requirement so it’s important for business owners and public sector bodies to understand and fix issues preventing compliance.
The standardised set of rules that websites should comply with is known as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG for short. The guidelines are split into three levels – A, AA and AAA. A website that meets level A compliance conforms to a basic standard of accessibility and this should be sufficient for most small businesses. Those with a desire to go further can aim for a level AA, while the highest level AAA is incredibly hard to achieve and unfortunately impractical in most situations.
Because accessibility is a broad and complex field of study, we took time to distil the WCAG 2.0 guidelines into a simplified digestible format for sales agents and business owners.
We give a simple and clear breakdown of how many issues the website homepage has against the three WCAG levels, as well as clear recommendations to the business owner.
It’s important to note that while this automated check is really useful to give an “at a glance” overview of key issues, some of the accessibility guidelines can only be checked with a manual audit.
If you’re interested in more comprehensive WCAG 2.1 accessibility audits, and a framework to help your team achieve full compliance across a large web estate, check out our sister product Silktide Monitor.
This new test can be enabled in your account today. For more information, talk to your Customer Success Manager.
14th June 2021
17th August 2023