Web Quality and Accessibility Scanning

The TTU IT Division has partnered with Silktide to provide a website quality and accessibility testing solution.

What is Silktide?

Silktide is a platform that automatically scans websites for accessibility, content, and marketing issues. Texas Tech Univesrity has implemented Silktide for all websites under the depts.ttu.edu domain to ensure that webpages offered by the university meet accessibility guidelines and provide quality content for their intended users. Any issues discovered by Silktide scans can then be addressed by the site owners, managers, or content editors for that site.

How can I get access?

You can request access to Silktide by submitting a Web Quality and Accessibility Scanning request. All requests will need to be approved by the appropriate Web Site Content Owner. If you are hoping to correct issues discovered by Silktide, you will need access to Omni CMS.

How do I use Silktide?

We recommend that you begin with the Getting Started course in the Academy. It has a series of short videos (most under 2 minutes) to get you up to speed in under 20 minutes. Go to the top right, click on your profile icon, and choose Academy.

When you log into Silktide, you'll see screenshots of the sites you have been assigned to, click into any of them to open the report. Here's a rundown of the areas covered in the report:

Content

The Content module identifies issues related to the actual content on your site. This section will cover spelling and grammar issues, as well as accessibility and search engine optimization tasks that are specific to content editors.

Accessibility

This Accessibility module will identify any accessibility issues present on your site. There are a variety of automated and manual checks in this section, each associated with a given Web Content Accessibility Guildelines (WCAG) standard. Correcting these issues will make your site more accessible to people with disabilities.

Marketing

The Marketing module will assist you in creating pages that can be found on search engines. This section also provdies insights into the popularity of your site, as well as what other websites are linking to your site.

User Experience

The User Experience module provides insights into how users interact with your website. You can use the tools here to optimize your site for the variety of devices and networks upon which your users may access your site.

Privacy

The Privacy module help highlight potential privacy issues that may be present on your site. This section includes tools to see all phone numbers or emails listed on your site, allowing you an easy pathway to update that information should changes be needed.

Known Limitations of Automated Scanning

• Many typographical errors will remain undetected as there is no check for correctly spelled words created from mistyping the intended word (ex. to instead of too or the instead of them)
• Some correctly spelled words especially scientific terms and proper names will be marked as misspelled if they are not in the global dictionary. (contact itteamweb@ttu.edu for assistance in tailoring future scans to omit these results)
• Links behind eRaider may return false hits for broken links (contact itteamweb@ttu.edu for assistance in tailoring future scans to omit these results)
• Alt Tags are returned broken if missing and are not scanned for accuracy or usefulness( the the web content author is responsible to ensure the effective and appropriate use of all text equivalents for images)