On this page:
- New users: Getting started
- Dashboards
- Using the Accessibility section
- Using the Quality Assurance section
Logging in
Your very first time log in to Siteimprove with your CalNet login will create your account in the system. To access data and reports for your site, you'll need to submit a Siteimprove Support request so we can then add your access.
Getting started
Once your account is set up, when you log in to Siteimprove, you’ll be in the Dashboard area. If you venture away, you can always come back to this screen by choosing Dashboard from the left sidebar menu.
As a new user, there are three sections in Siteimprove to learn about:
- Dashboards
- Quality Assurance
- Accessibility
The good news? You can ignore many of the other sections. We don’t subscribe to the Analytics module (only the Content module), so you should ignore anything related to analytics and marketing.
For the most part, data in Siteimprove is organized to let you view information at three levels:
- At the top level, you get a bird’s eye view of all the issues on all of the pages of your website.
- If you drill down to the next level, you can view all pages with a single issue or all instances of a content type.
- Page Reports provide detailed information about specific issues on a single page.
Dashboards
Dashboards contain a collection of widgets, each of which focuses on an accessibility feature or data view.
If you only have access to data for one site, it will display at the top of the Dashboard window (see #1 in graphic below). If you have access to multiple sites, select a site by clicking the site dropdown. Then, either select or search for your site.
If your team has a large site that is divided into subsites, you may also need to select a Group, which displays only sections of a website.
Select the Dashboard (see #2 in the graphic) named _Accessibility at Berkeley at the top of the list.
Widgets used in the _Accessibility at Berkeley Dashboard allow you to drill down to get more information.
You may also save, download, or share Dashboard reports:
WCAG A and AA Failures widget
This is similar to the content in the Issues section of Accessibility, but this table has been configured to display only best practice, A, and AA failures:
From here, you can either:
- Click the issue links to go to the issue detail page, which lists all the pages with that issue -OR-
- Use the dropdown in the Page column to view all the pages with that issue. You can use the page link to go to the Page Report.
In the graphic below, the Image missing alt text issue is expanded and lists three pages with this issue:
If you were to click one of these page links, you’d be taken to a Page Report.
Below is a screenshot of the widget titled, Non descriptive link text:
If you click the page links, they’ll open a Page Report in a new tab. In a Page Report, issues are listed in the left sidebar. As you expand/select each issue, more information displays and in the pageview window (right), the corresponding issue is highlighted:
Hint: Page Reports display a link to the actual page at the top. Click that link to open your page in a new tab and fix the issue. Then, come back and click the Recheck this page icon to request a new crawl and updated results.
Accessibility
The accessibility menu contains several sections you may find useful. The most important one is the Issues section.
Issues
The Issues section was used to create the WCAG A and AA Failures widget on the Dashboard, so it behaves the same way. This section is extremely useful when you’re working to remediate your website. You can view the data by issue or by page. You can also use filters and custom views to see only the information you’re most interested in. This can help you prioritize and/or assign remediation tasks if needed.
As a starting point, we recommend the following Filters and Custom Views:
In Filters → Conformance → Make sure AAA is un-checked so AAA issues don’t show. This will help you prioritize legal requirements first. Leave the remaining Filters checked to include the other options.
In Custom Views → Check the following boxes to turn on: Conformance, Difficulty, Occurrences, Pages, and Points you can gain.
Hint: From here, you can download a CSV file or add issues in Jira. You may want to filter for all issues with a remediation difficulty of intermediate and advanced and give this list to your development team.
From here, you can get to the issue detail pages. These are the same issue detail pages that you can access from the Dashboard.
Below is the Image missing a text alternative page:
From here, click on one of the links in the Pages with this issue section.
This will open a Page Report that lists all of the Images missing alt text on this specific page. Select one of the issues from the left sidebar and the item with that issue is highlighted in the page preview window:
Other useful sections in Accessibility:
- Accessibility overview - similar to a Dashboard, this provides a score, progress over time, and issues.
- Groups - If your team is responsible for only a segment of a large website, you can set up a Group. This will allow you to view reports for only the section of the site you’re responsible for. You tell Siteimprove which URL matches to include or exclude. Visit Siteimprove for more information about how to set up Groups based on URL matches.
- Potential issues
Quality Assurance
The Quality Assurance area focuses on a variety of elements that can affect usability, accessibility, and search engine rankings.
With regard to accessibility, the sections you might find most useful are:
- Links
- The Pages with broken links view displays all the broken links on each page. The pages with the most broken links are displayed first.
- The Broken links view displays all the broken links, and all the pages with that same broken link. This allows you to fix all instances of that link at the same time, which may be faster.
- Readability - Even if your users can read at a grade 14 level, does not mean they want to all the time. Save them time. Be succinct. (Learn about plain language.)
- Inventory - There are several ways this section may be helpful:
- As a snapshot of all your content
- To quickly review certain content types. For example, if everyone in your department gets new phone numbers, you’ll want to locate and update all the phone numbers on your site.
- To make sure a particular page or section of your site is being crawled by Siteimprove, go to the Pages section and enter the page path to search for it (the page path is /this_part of the URL, after the domain). Pages of your site will be missed by Siteimprove if they aren’t linked to anywhere on the pages that are being crawled.
Example: Broken Links section
- The Broken Links section gives you a list of broken (and possibly broken) links. Click the dropdown arrow icon in the Pages column to view which pages contain the broken link.
- Click the broken link to review it yourself and confirm that it’s broken.
- Then, click the page link that contains the broken link.
The Page Report opens in a new tab. Broken link occurrences will be listed on the left and as you select each item, the link is highlighted in red in the page preview:
More resources
We’re here to help! If you have questions or need help, use the Siteimprove Support Request form.
- Siteimprove Help Center
- Interactive tutorials
- Guides and FAQs
- Siteimprove Workshop recording (Berkeley users only)