This week, Support Lead, Helen Grimbly will outline how the Accessibility module of a Sitemorse eeport will help to improve the Accessibility of your site, and the help features provided.

Sitemorse assesses sites for many Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 as defined by the W3C. There are three levels of conformity (A, AA, AAA). A is priority 1 requirements that must be met, or it's impossible for some people to access the web content. AA describes meeting priority 1 and also priority 2 requirements that must be met or some people will find access to the site difficult. And AAA describes meeting priority 1, 2 and also priority 3 requirements that may be met to make the site easier for some people.

The Accessibility category in a Sitemorse Report prioritises which Accessibility diagnostics we recommend should be actioned first to improve accessibility of your site.

From the Accessibility summary page, select the first chart 'Priority' (the chart itself shows number of pages without priority actions) to view actions to looks at first. An example priority is 'Add description for an image used as a link' - which if resolved means a user with a screenreader will be read back what selecting that link will do (in this case the image is being used as the link rather than text).

Sitemorse provides many features to help review and resolve each accessibility diagnostic including:

• Video - A video icon link to the left of each action listed, which helps explain the guideline and how resolving the action will improve your site.
• Title and Description - Friendly title and desciption text to describe the accessibility action and what it means.
• Occurrences - The number of occurrences of the accessibility action to be resolved on your site.
• Workflow (Forward) - An icon to the right of each priority, the action can be forwarded to someone for them to review (they don't have to be a Sitemorse user to receive and view this action).

Select one of the listed actions to view more detail, and you will be taken to more information about that requirement. This will include:

• Technique reference - a link to the official WCAG documentation which will provide more information and examples for the accessibility requirement in question.

For each occurence of the action on your site:

• Short description - short description such as "F38: Link must contain text content of image 'alt' text".
• URL - a link to the page the accessibility action occurred on.
• Line / Page number - the line number in the html source of a web page, or page number in a PDF, that the accessiblity action to be resolved is found. This number also links to the SMARTVIEW source which shows what the line or page at the time of the assessment looked like.
• SMARTVIEW (View page) icon - click to open the SMARTVIEW to view the page at the time of the assessment (which Sitemorse store s a copy of), with the accessibility requirement highlighted on the page where applicable (e.g. the image that requires alt text).
• SMARTVIEW (Highlight in Source) icon - click to open the SMARTVIEW to view the source of the page at the time of the assessment (applicable to, for example, HTML or CSS files).

All, or a combination, of these help features can be used to locate and resolve an accessiblity requirement to improve access to your site, and therefore usability and productivity of your site.

As well as providing a set of Priority actions, the Accessiblity category has charts for each level of conformity (A, AA, AAA) where the user can select each chart on the summary page and drill down to each set of actions, which are highlighted in red where requirements need addressing. These actions can also be filtered according to whether they appear on HTML pages or PDFs.

By prioritising the accessibility actions required, with explanations and locations of where they occur, this will greatly improve the process of making your site more accessible.