Things You Might Do in SiteImprove

There are countless ways SiteImprove can help you optimize your website, particularly by improving the digital accessibility of your site, and also by addressing typos, broken links and more. The following sections are some of the most relevant to H&S Web Editors. Within each section, instructions are provided to help fix the issues on your site.
There are many ways to access the same data within SiteImprove. For instance, a list of broken links on your site can be found by taking any number of paths, including: navigating to the Policies section and looking at the policy for Broken Links; navigating to the Quality Assurance menu; visiting the Dashboard titled, "_Broken Links"; visiting the Dashboard titled "_5 minute fixes"; and probably several more!

This guide shows one way of accessing each type of data. Please feel free to poke around SiteImprove and see what's there. You may discover a path that is more intuitive for you!
Jump to:
 Broken Links⁠ 
 Five Minute Fixes⁠ 
 Commitment to Accessibility: Fall 24⁠ 
 Commitment to Accessibility: Fall 23⁠ 
 Use the Accessibility Dashboards⁠ 
 Using the Accessibility Menu⁠ 
 Using the Policy Menu to Improve Accessibility⁠ 
 Policies to "Favorite"⁠ 
 How to use Policies⁠ 

View Various Dashboards

The left side of the SiteImprove page is a navigation menu. The first option is Dashboards, which are different groupings of various information. These groupings provide report(s) that have been created for you. The following Dashboards might be especially relevant or helpful for H&S site editors.
Although we are only highlighting a couple of options here, you are welcome to play around with all the choices to find additional boards that might suit your needs!

Broken Links

This dashboard shows a complete list of the broken links on your site.

The list itemizes all the broken links on your site. There is a column labeled "# pages" that details how many pages include that broken link. For instance, if this column shows "4" then that specific broken link appears on 4 pages of your website.
Note: The link may appear more than once on a given page!
To view a list of each page with that particular broken link, click the caret in the column labeled "# pages."

From here you can take 2 actions:
    .1Click the button on the left labeled "Open in Page Inspector." This will pull up a page on SiteImprove that shows exactly where on your webpage the broken link lives. This is especially helpful if your page contains a lot of text or a lot of links.
    .2Click the button on the right with your webpage's URL. This will bring you to your actual website, specifically to the page with the broken link. However, doing this requires you to locate each instance of the broken link; they won't be highlighted on your site.

Once you have located the broken link on your page, open the editing module and make the correction.

Five Minute Fixes


Short on time but want to make an impact? This provides an overview of straightforward things that can be fixed quickly. There are sections for:
  • misspelled words
  • repeated short words (e.g. "the the")
  • images missing Alt Text
  • broken links
For each instance, you can click on the caret to view the page(s) with the issue or click the window button to visit the page on your site with the concern.
Since this dashboard provides an overview of several areas, it tends to only show 5 items at a time. Be sure to scroll through all of the pages within each section!

Commitment to Accessibility: Fall 24


The Fall 2024 Accessibility Dashboard contains information about the PDFs and other types of documents housed on your website. Because it is so easy to make a PDF inaccessible, the University aims to reduce the number of PDFs altogether. The inventory within this dashboard allows users to identify all PDFs, as well as the specific PDFs with issues. It also displays a list of all PDFs housed in Google Drive.
Since this dashboard provides an overview of several areas, it tends to only show 5 items at a time. Be sure to scroll through all of the pages within each section!

Use this dashboard to locate your files with accessibility concerns and take one of the following actions:
  • Retire the PDF altogether. Perhaps it's a very old PDF with outdated information or is no longer relevant. In this case, you can simply remove it from your site.
  • Convert the PDF to web content. Rather than remediate a PDF, it often makes more sense to eliminate it and add the content directly to your site. In addition to not forcing users to download a file to their device, an added bonus of adding information as web content is that it becomes searchable within your site.
  • Remediate the PDF. When information must be kept in PDF format, it requires remediation. There are several ways this can be done. If you're tech-savvy, you can use  Equidox  or Adobe Pro to make the changes. If you'd prefer to outsource, the university has contracts with multiple  third-party vendors  (SUNet login required).


Commitment to Accessibility: Fall 23


There are three goals for the Fall 2023 Accessibility push:
    .1Resolve Level A issues reported in SiteImprove
    .2Ensure all Stanford web pages include an Accessibility link.
    .3Improve audio and video accessibility

This dashboard is organized to show where work is required. The first section displays all Level A issues. Some of these will be content-based (e.g. a web editor skipped around different headings or omitted alt text on images) and others may require an edit within the code.

The second section lists all pages that lack a link to Stanford's Accessibility compliance page. Sites on the H&S Drupal Platform are set up with such a link in the website footer. However, those sites not on our platform must ensure this link is added.

The remainder of this dashboard focuses on audio and video content. All videos uploaded on or after January 1, 2023 must contain captions. All audio files, e.g. podcasts, uploaded on or after January 1, 2023 must include a transcript.  Information about what constitutes acceptable captions and transcripts can be found at SODA .

Check Accessibility Compliance

Use the Accessibility Dashboards

  • Document-related accessibility is covered in the  Commitment to Accessibility: Fall 24 dashboard⁠ .
  • Use the  Commitment to Accessibility: Fall 23 dashboard⁠ to resolve all Level A issues, identify pages missing the link to Stanford's Accessibility Compliance page, and improve audio and video file accessibility.

Using the Accessibility Menu

SiteImprove has an entire section dedicated to Accessibility. It provides fairly robust metrics that track changes in Accessibility over time.

To get started in this section, navigate to the Accessibility tab in the main navigation panel on the left. Next, click on Issues.

Once you're at the Issues page, you will see your specific site(s). If you don't, you may choose the correct site by either selecting from the dropdown menu at the top (labeled "3a" in the screenshot above) or by typing in your site name into the search bar (labeled "3b" in the screenshot). Once you find your site(s), you can click on the star icon (labeled "4" in the screenshot) to "favorite" them, which allows them to remain at the top of your list.

Click on your site to be taken to a list of all Accessibilities Issues.

A lot of data will be displayed. Let's break down what it all means and how to filter it so you only see what's relevant to you:
  • Conformance: This column identifies the type of issue. We are most concerned with Level A and Level AA.
  • Responsibility: While there might be some Level A or AA issues in your list, your unit may or may not be responsible for them. For instance, Alt Text on an image is a "Content Writing" issue. That would be a site editor's responsibility. Others issues might be listed under "Development" or "UX Design." You can leave those to the H&S Web Team!
  • Element Type: This tells you if the accessibility issue relates to heading structure, images, links, etc.
  • Pages: This lets you know how many pages contain one or more instances of this issue. For instance, you might have 10 pages that contain at least one image that lacks Alt Text. If you click the caret next to the number in this column, SiteImprove will display a list of each page that contains this issue.

Next, you'll want to filter your view to keep it from becoming overwhelming. To limit your list to just Level A and AA issues, click Filters ⟶ Conformance ⟶ Level A and Level AA ⟶ Confirm ⟶ Apply. If your list of issues is still long, you might also want to filter by Responsibility ⟶ Content Writing and Visual Design ⟶ Confirm ⟶ Apply. This will eliminate the issues that you won't be able to resolve.

Once filtered, the list generally becomes more manageable. In fact, most sites on the H&S platform have no Level A or AA issues! In the case shown in the next screenshot, we have two level A Content Writing issues. These can both be tackled by H&S web editors.

Take Action

Click on one of the items in this list. You will then see a list of the pages with that issue.

This example shows all pages with images missing Alt Text. Some particularly helpful information is included at the top. Going left to right we can see:
  • This is a Level A issue, so we know it must be resolved.
  • We can earn 0.25 SiteImprove "points" by resolving every instance on this list.
  • There are two pages that contain images lacking Alt Text.
  • There are two occurrences of images lacking Alt Text. Note that this metric differs slightly from the above. Although this example shows equal pages and occurrences, keep in mind that some pages might contain multiple of the same issue, e.g. several images without Alt Text. If that were true, we would expect to see, for example, 2 pages with this issue and 5 occurrences.

To find the specific pages and instances of missing Alt Text, scroll down the page. You'll see a link to each page in this list. Click the hyperlink to view a screenshot of this page in SiteImprove.

The screenshot of your page will highlight the issue with a red box that flashes a few times to alert you where you need to focus. From there, you can click your site's URL at the top of the page to be taken to this page on your site. Edit the page accordingly to fix the issue.

Once you've resolved the issue on your actual website, you can click the refresh button in the top left of the SiteImprove screenshot page. This will rescan the page and confirm the issue is resolved.
After you've told SiteImprove to rescan the page, you will either see that the issue is still present, or you will see a new green box in the left column. Great job! You've resolved this issue. Next, return to your list of issues and repeat the process as necessary.
In the event you're not sure how to fix the issue, the panel on the left provides helpful information. If you're still struggling, please reach out to the SiteImprove team or the H&S Web Team for further assistance.


Using the Policy Menu to Improve Accessibility

Additional Accessibility information can be accessed via the Policy menu in the left hand navigation panel. Read more about  what "Policy" means in SiteImprove⁠ and learn which  specific policy scans are helpful for accessibility⁠ .

The Policy Menu

"Policies" in SiteImprove are the various custom scans that can be run on your site. For example, we have a policy that checks for YouTube video embeds. That means that SiteImprove will scan your site and generate a list of every single page that has one or more embedded YouTube videos.

To access these lists, click "Policy" in the main navigation menu on the left side of the screen. Select "My policies" from the resulting list. All of the pre-set policies will appear in the main area of your screen.

There are dozens of policies. We encourage you to skim the list to see if any might be helpful for your site's unique needs. If you want SiteImprove to crawl your site for anything else, reach out to Kevin Murphy who can set up custom policies for you.


Policies to "Favorite"

With that said, we have a list of commonly used policies that we recommend you "favorite" by clicking on the star button. Doing so will allow you to quickly filter out the policies that you don't need to pay attention to. This is our list of recommendations:

Accessibility Policies

  • Video and audio links/embeds There are various policies for the major video and audio file platforms, including YouTube and Vimeo for videos, and SoundCloud, Spotify, and iTunes for audio. They include:
  • "Captions Project: iTunes Podcasts - Links or Embeds (Podcasts)"
  • "Captions Project: Soundcloud Embeds (Podcasts)"
  • "Captions Project: Spotify Embeds (Podcasts)"
  • "Captions Project: Vimeo Embeds (Videos)"
  • "Captions Project: YouTube Embeds (Videos)"
  • "Captions Project: Zoom Recordings (External Links)"
Use these policies to view how many of your web pages contain at least one of these types of media (note: some pages have more than one!). From here, you can check if the media is still relevant. You can also check for appropriate captions/transcripts.
  • Link to Accessibility in the Footer "A11y: Pages without Accessibility link" will show you each page on your site that doesn't contain a link to SODA in the footer. Generally speaking, if your site is on the H&S web platform, you shouldn't have any pages with this issue!

Other Helpful Policies

  • Broken links "QA: New pages with broken links" is the policy that shows all of the links on your site that direct users to pages that no longer exist.
  • Documents older than 3 years This policy, "A11y & QA: Documents older than 3 years," shows all of the files which were uploaded to your site more than 3 years ago. It's always a good idea to check these for continued relevance, as well as assessing whether the information can be incorporated directly into your site. Doing so is both more accessible and makes your content searchable!
  • Spelling Errors You'd be surprised how many sites contain errant misspellings! Check them out with "QA: New spelling errors."

How to use Policies

Clicking a Policy will pull up a list of pages that match the search. For example, if you click "QA: New pages with broken links" you will see a list of every page that has at least one broken link.

You will see a line graph at the top of the page. This indicates how the number of matches on your site has changed over time. There is a number at the right of this graph showing how many current matches are detected. Below the graph, you can find a list of each match.

Click the blue hyperlink text to see where on the page that match can be found. This will take you to a screenshot of your page. From here, you can either click the URL at the top, or if you're HTML savvy, you can click the "View HTML" button and look for the match in the code. This is particularly helpful when you're searching for audio and video embeds.


Take Action

Use SiteImprove to find the issues within your page(s) and visit your actual website to log in and make the necessary edits.