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Geoffroy Noël edited this page Sep 30, 2022 · 10 revisions

General concepts

Issues

  • A rule is the equivalent of a general success criterion, it has a code made of three numbers (the principle, the guideline and the criterion)
  • An issue is a rule broken by a web page in a specific location on that page

Issues are first detected, recorded, then assessed and assigned to a role, then resolved. Eventually outstanding issues are reported to partners (report) or to the public (Accessibility statement).

Webval can detect and record some issues automatically using third-party detection engines (Pa11y, HTML CodeSniffer and Axe-core). That automated evaluation happens when you click "Evaluate" button or when you run the evaluate.js script from the command line.

An issue is therefore either:

  • automated: it was recorded by Webval during an automated evaluation
  • manual: it was recorded by a user with one of the forms (at the bottom of the Issues tab)

SiteImprove issues are considered manual, because the recording involved copy & paste, although the detection is done automatically in the browser.

The resolution of an issue indicates how it has been handled:

  • Todo: the issue is present on the site and needs to be assigned, assessed or addressed
  • in progress: the issue is being addressed by someone (other people should not work on it)
  • addressed: someone thinks the issue is no longer present (or was never present) on the site
  • won't: the issue is still present but will not be fixed in this cycle (or ever)
  • fixed: an automated issue which was no longer detected during the last automated evaluation

Note:

  • only Webval can set an (automated) issue to 'Fixed'
  • please make sure you use 'Addressed' (as opposed to Won't) for inaccurately recorded issues

An issue is either:

  • Open = todo, in progress or addressed (if automated)
  • Closed = addressed (if manual), won't or fixed

The "Statement issues" filter return all the issues which are still present on the site and should therefore be reported in the Accessibility statement.

An annotation is a categorisation or description of an issue, it contains the following fields:

  • role: the role the issue is assigned to for assessment or resolution
  • resolution: see above
  • complexity:
    • Small: up to one hour to resolve it;
    • Medium: up to one day;
    • Large: a day or more
  • comment: explanations to rest of team about the categorisation of the issue

Automated evaluation

An automated evaluation is the detection of issues by one or more engines on a collection of web pages. At the end of an evaluation:

  • previously detected issues which are no longer detected are marked as "fixed" and will appear as "Closed Issues"
  • all other issues (new or still detected) are marked as "Todo" and up for review under the "Open Issues" listing
  • all existing issues will keep their annotations

An automated evaluation never removes issues. It only adds new issues or mark existing ones as Fixed or Todo.

Recording SiteImprove issues

Please ensure your SiteImprove Accessibility Checker browser extension is recent as the old, legacy extension is no longer available for download or maintained. If in doubt, uninstall and install it again.

Webval has some limited semi-automated support for SiteImprove. It is possible to import all groups of issues (not actual occurrences on a page) from SiteImprove browser plugin panel into Webval issue list. There is a loss of granularity, as you won't see HTML snippets and Selectors to specific occurrences of the issue in the webpage. Instead you'll see a summary of the problem, listed under a WCAG rule. That summary may refer to multiple occurrences on your web page.

In that sense Webval doesn't replace manual interaction with SiteImprove plugin. It mainly helps you save significant amount of time by not reporting manually all the issues into Webval.

How to add SiteImprove issues into Webval?

  1. Run SiteImprove on one of the web pages registered with Webval (e.g. the home page of your site)
  2. Copy the content of the whole SiteImprove side panel into your clipboard (on my computer I just click once on the right of the "SiteImprove" heading at the top, then CTRL-a, CTRL-c (or COMMAND on a mac instead of CTRL)). The entire content of the panel should be highlighted.
  3. Paste that content into the SiteImprove form at the bottom of Webval Issue Tab
  4. Select the correct webpath in that form
  5. Click 'Add issues'

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Webval will add the issues to the list.

  • If an issue wasn't already in the list, it marks it as 'Todo'
  • If it was in the list but marked as 'Addressed' it will revert to 'Todo'
  • Other SiteImprove issues previously recorded on that page but not detected this time round will be marked as 'Addressed'
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