Siteimprove

What is Siteimprove?

Siteimprove is a website monitoring tool that scans and scores websites on:

Siteimprove Onboarding

Begin the onboarding process with these 2 easy steps.

Step 1: Provision your user account

  1. Login to MyAccess.ucsf.edu (Siteimprove uses SSO, single sign-on)
  2. Open another browser tab/window and go to siteimprove.ucsf.edu

Remember to choose the option for “University of California – San Francisco” as the default may be set to a different UC campus.

Step 2: Identify your sites

Complete this onboarding form to let us know which websites you want to monitor.

If you manage more than one site, please list them all in this form.

Please note that Siteimprove cannot crawl Drupal Site Builder sites that are in maintenance mode.

You do not have to do anything else at this point. Your main dashboard will be empty and show no information until the initial website crawl is completed for the website(s) you identified in Step 2. 

While you wait for your account and site(s) to be set-up, please explore Siteimprove's Help Center with the free extensive training academy. After step #1 is complete, you have immediate access to the training academy. We recommend Accessibility Fundamentals for the Web. More details of provisioning an account is available on our Training page in the Siteimprove section. In the video at the 40:07 timestamp is a demo of a newly provisioned user accessing the Help Center for the first time.

Step 3: Final Configuration

This last step is done by the Local Administrator in UCSF Web Services. Your user account provisioned in Step 1 is associated with the sites you identified in Step 2 and includes the site's approval and initial crawl by Siteimprove. This configuration is typically done on Fridays. So the following Monday, login to Siteimprove at siteimprove.ucsf.edu to verify you can see your site's dashboard scores.

After Your Account is Configured

How to get to Siteimprove from a Browser

First login into MyAccess. Then open a new browser tab/window to access Siteimprove at siteimprove.ucsf.edu.

Efficiency Tips

  1. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for opening a new tab (Command T in Chrome on a Mac) or window (Command W in Chrome on a Mac) in your browser of choice for your operating system.
  2. Bookmark or memorize the URL siteimprove.ucsf.edu. This new URL was put in place by UCSF IT providing a redirect from siteimprove.ucop.edu to siteimprove.ucsf.edu. This is an easier-to-remember URL for our UCSF campus users that might not bookmark the URL. Both URLs go to the same place.

Warning

Siteimprove should not prompt you for credentials to log in. If Siteimprove is prompting you for a username and password, close the browser tab and start over at MyAccess and verify you are still logged in. Next step is to logout out of MyAccess, close all occurrences of your browser, and begin again: login to MyAccess and open another tab, go to siteimprove.ucsf.edu. The URL siteimprove.ucop.edu will get you to the same place. Siteimprove.com will get you to the wrong place and probably prompt you for a password.

Where is it coming from?

Siteimprove was originally procured by the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) in its commitment to providing accessible and inclusive websites to our external audiences. Visit the UCOP Siteimprove page.

This tool is free for our use at UCSF and other UC campuses. Please note that sites must be on a UCSF domain or if hosted off-site, must have a connection to or be sponsored by UCSF.

Siteimprove has been adopted by many higher education organizations to live up to the mounting requirements of accessibility.

What Siteimprove will do for you

  • Crawls your site to provide a prioritized list of issues.
  • Requires no special expertise to use the tool.
  • Provides the Training Academy with a library of tutorials to deepen your knowledge about web standards at your own pace.

Expectations for Site Owners

  • Identify stakeholders so we can keep them in the loop.
  • Attend Digital Accessibility Office Hours to review your scores and ask questions.
  • Watch our UCSF Siteimprove Accessibility Kick-off Meeting recording.
  • Explore the Siteimprove Training Academy on your own for more training as needed.
  • Take responsibility for remediation.
  • Add the Priority Script, aka the analytics script, for number of page views to help prioritize accessibility issues by fixing your most visited pages first.

Resources

IT Web Services

  • Presents introductory training on the new tool and the Siteimprove Training Academy.
  • Provides triage for website owners seeking assistance.
  • Acts as a resource to analyze what path to take.
  • Points website owners to recharge services or outside vendors for remediation.
  • Join the UC Tech Siteimprove Slack channel to engage with other users and help build our community of practice.

Siteimprove

  • Siteimprove’s Status page. Subscribe to get incident announcements.
  • If you can still get to the user interface (UI) but a component is down, use the live chat feature. 

Core Sites

Core Sites are our high traffic public-facing sites.

Pilot program April 2018

The pilot program list was provided by UCOP. The majority of these sites are consistent across campuses in University of California System.

Core Sites Phase 2

The phase 2 list is the next batch of high-traffic public-facing sites at UCSF.

Campus-wide Use

We rolled out the Siteimprove monitoring tool to the UCSF Community in 2018. Details of our monthly kick-off meeting for new users and monthly Accessibility Office Hours is on our Events page. As of January 2020, 765 UCSF sites are in Siteimprove. As of January 2021, 860 UCSF sites are in Siteimprove.