The Office of Digital Communications has started a review of the adoption of our general QA and accessibility issue reporting tool, Siteimprove.
Siteimprove is an online tool that provides feedback and recommendations for optimizing your website by evaluating three key categories:
- Quality
- Accessibility
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
DigiComm makes Siteimprove available to all FIU web editors free of charge. You can request access to Siteimprove through our team.
We do so in support of FIU's Digital Communications Standards Policy, which requires all university websites to be accessible.
It is the policy of FIU that all official University information published on FIU’s Web sites shall be accessible to all users. All FIU digital solutions under University jurisdiction are required to comply with State and Federal laws governing accessibility (i.e., provided by University servers or by otherwise servers funded by University budgets) must comply with all applicable local, State and Federal laws and with the State of Florida Board of Governors and FIU’s policies, rules and regulations.
In practice, the university has agreed on conforming to WCAG 2.0 A and AA standards, while generally, DigiComm strives to conform to the latest AAA standards, where feasible. If you read our Core release notes, you'll notice we highlight many of our accessibility updates and fixes.
While we understand that making our websites accessible is a requirement, we also operate with the understanding that it's the right thing to do.
To make our websites as accessible as possible, we've begun reviewing our userbase in Siteimprove and comparing it to our list of Cascade editors. If you can edit a website, you should have access to Siteimprove to ensure the edits you're making are accessible.
Over the next few weeks, you may start seeing reports compiling different QA, accessibility and SEO issues. We encourage you to make use of these reports and get acquainted with Siteimprove to learn how to use this great tool to the fullest.
We plan on writing a few how-to and best practices blog posts regarding Siteimprove and general accessibility topics. In the meantime, there are a slew of resources available through Siteimprove. You can also visit our Accessibility page.
If you have specific questions you want answered in our documentation or posts, you can submit a request via our documentation and feature request form.