T4 and Silkide

Silktide allows users of different technical ability a way to identify how they can participate in making those improvements. First go to the Actions section of the Accessibility section. The actions screen shows you what actions are recommended to improve an area of your website.

→ Accessibility → Actions

Silktide breaks down actions into a set of roles: Editors, Designers, and Developers. These roles help organise the issues needing to be fixed or reassessed so each person using Silktide knows where they can help.

Editors deal with the content and can make changes to the copy on the page, fix broken links or spelling mistakes, and adjust images that are missing alt text. Designers focus on page layout issues or style elements like color contrast. Developers understand how to make all the programmable changes that affect structural issues, for instance issues that impact mobile pages.

• Note: If you are only focused on the accessibility of the content alone, you can also find a list of the issues in the side menu under the Content tab in the section Content Accessibility.
  
  → Content → Content Accessibility
  
  

When tackling accessibility issues, we need a strategy on how to advance towards compliance with the Web Accessibility Directive. To achieve compliance, we need to be fully compliant (a Silktide score of 100%) with WCAG 2.1 A, and AA guidelines. Silktide measures our progress on both of these.

To begin, focus first on addressing only the single A issues. The single A group constitutes the most immediate changes we need to make to our website.

The next step will focus on how to fix and the issues you come across. Once you have made your way through all the single A actions, then move on to the AA actions by clicking the button for AA.

Select an issue from the list that you wish to focus on. Actions are put into categories and displays how many issues of this particular type there are, and how close this particular issue is towards 100% completion.

When you clink on the link it open ups a page where it will explain the accessibility guidelines on that particular issue, show you all instances of that particular issue, and list which pages are affected.

If after reading through the accessibility guidelines you find that the issue being flagged is fine the way it currently is, you can choose to approve it. If it requires more work then click on the magnifying glass icon to open up the inspector page for the final step.

In the inspector, you can highlight each issue on a particular page and see what needs to be changed and why. The inspector page shows you the url of the page and the particular issue you want to see. You also will have the ability to view any and all other issues found on that page through the inspector.  

The inspector can show you the HTML of the issue and give you helpful suggestions on how you can make adjustments to the code.

Silktide only shows you what is currently there, so to actually make the change you will have to do so in terminalfour. Silktide has made this easy through its integration with terminalfour, so once you are ready to make a change click on the Pencil icon in the top right corner of the screen. This will open the page that you are working on to be fixed in terminalfour.