What is an accessibility score?
An accessibility score is a measure of how well a website conforms to accessibility guidelines and best practices. It takes into account factors such as the use of alt text for images, closed captions for videos, heading structure, and much more. The score is represented as a number between 0 and 100, with higher scores indicating better accessibility.
Accessibility scores are calculated based on compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 accessibility standard. This standard is widely recognized and accepted as the benchmark for accessibility on the web.
Why is accessibility score important?
An accessibility score can help you monitor the accessibility of your website and ensure that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can use it. This includes people with visual, auditory, and motor impairments, as well as those with cognitive and neurological disabilities. Without good accessibility, these individuals may struggle to navigate your website or may not be able to access it at all.
With 16% of the global population living with a disability, you could be turning away a large number of visitors to your website. Ensuring you have an accessible website is just the right thing to do.
But making your website accessible also has additional benefits to your website. Catering for accessibility can also result in better UX, design, and optimized, user-friendly content. All of which make your website more attractive to search engines. This means that you’re not only able to reach a wider audience by being accessible but you are also able to boost traffic through better SEO.
How is an accessibility score calculated?
When Silktide scans your website, it also checks everything from your content, design, and back-end code for accessibility. Accessibility checks are made against WCAG 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 but the score is only calculated based on your website’s compliance against WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards.
So accessibility scores allow you to get a general oversight over how your website is performing against compliance standards. They are also often used in regular reports to higher management to show progress over time.
It’s worth noting that a small number of checks that are part of WCAG 2.1 are not possible to detect using automation. That’s why Silktide flags these areas as a potential issue so that you can manually test these and confirm whether they are accessible.
How can accessibility scores help you improve your website?
Accessibility scores provide a quick and easy way to assess the accessibility of your website. You can also segment different sections of your website to see your scores across predefined sections. By focusing on the areas where your score is low, you can make targeted improvements to your website’s accessibility.
It’s important to note that a score of 100 may be unattainable for some websites quickly. Instead, you should try to focus on making incremental improvements to your score over time, and make sure you monitor new content for accessibility as it’s published.
Find out your own website accessibility score with a free report on us by using the form below.