We sat down with Maria Kaffa, Digital Accessibility Specialist at University of East London, and discussed how they’re making the UEL website more accessible.
“The University of East London is a careers-first higher education (HE) institution. We prepare our students for the jobs of the future and have been doing this proudly for 125 years.
Prior to using Silktide, the Digital team relied on WCAG audits to discover accessibility issues on the UEL website, as well as any user feedback and issues encountered during business as usual. There was a previous software used for regular automated testing, and the team decided to look into other options available on the market, particularly for holistic reviews of accessibility, content, and user experience (UX).
As an institution, we needed a web governance platform that allowed us to do regular testing of UEL’s website for different areas, and give managers more flexibility compared to our then-platform. We compared the features offered on three platforms. We found that Silktide offered options that are most useful for our team and institutional priorities. Specifically, being able to check for content quality, accessibility, and UX is key as it allows us to see how the individual areas can also support each other for improvement.
“We found that Silktide offered options that are most useful for our team and institutional priorities. Specifically, being able to check for content quality, accessibility, and UX is key as it allows us to see how the individual areas can also support each other for improvement.”
Digital Accessibility Specialist, University of East London
Silktide also offered us value for money, an important consideration for procurement. The accessibility testing was also a key deciding factor – universities in the UK have to comply with PSBAR (2018), and the regular, thorough accessibility testing for WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 (AA) that Silktide offers can help us keep on top of our compliance and equality responsibilities. Furthermore, it is appealing that more HE institutions use Silktide, which gives a level of confidence when making regular use of the platform.
We have enabled Silktide to undertake full testing on the UEL website every 5 days. Regular testing helps us identify any break points after changes on the website – for example when we publish new content or deploy web improvements.
Day-to-day, we review the issues on Silktide and prioritize addressing them according to impact. We do this by looking at how many instances a specific issue has on the website and the WCAG compliance level it relates to. For accessibility, we write user stories for our web developers to work on. For content, our digital content editors can take proposed changes directly to the CMS for amends.
We have been able to deliver many improvements on the UEL website based on user stories raised that tackle issues identified by Silktide. We have seen an automated testing score improvement of around 20% in our overall accessibility compliance with WCAG 2.1 (AA), going from 65% in August 2023 to 85% in November 2023. Our average number of issues per page has also fallen over the same time period.
Overall, using Silktide alongside our own manual testing, accessibility improvements in new web features, and paired testing has helped our team advance accessibility on the UEL website, making a positive impact on the disabled user experience and for all.”
Ready to get started?
Request a demo