DubBot is the tool CAES content mangers use to monitor and address accessibility issues on their websites. It’s a powerful tool with a wide range of analytical capabilities, which can cause some initial confusion when trying to understand the results on a site’s dashboard. In this article we will discuss what parts of the dashboard CAES content managers should be working with and which ones they can safely ignore.
Table of Contents
Dashboard Overview
The site dashboard offers a high-altitude look at many different aspects of a website. It shows the overall site score, as well as individual scores for the issues on the site divided into six categories. CAES content managers should focus their efforts on three of those categories, which have the highest priority: Accessibility, Broken Links, and Spelling.
Because the Overall Site Score includes scoring from categories that we are not working with, like Web Governance and SEO, we ask that CAES content managers use the Accessibility category’s score as their benchmark.
The Web Support team is currently focused on the Accessibility, Broken Links, and Spelling categories and is ready to answer any questions about those issues.
The Web Support team will not be providing support for the other categories at this time.
Accessibility
The Accessibility category should receive the most focus, first. The issues in this category are typically violations of the set of web standards (WCAG 2.1) that are enforced by law. Content managers should work to correct all of the issues in this category before moving on the Broken Links and Spelling.
Accessibility issues are graded by severity of impact in DubBot from ‘Minor’ to ‘Critical’. Content managers can sort accessibility issues by impact and address the most serious issues first.
Broken Links
The Broken Links category should be next in order of priority. Be sure to review this category carefully and remove or correct any broken links that occur. If there are links that point to other CAES or Extension sites, content managers can report them to caesweb@uga.edu.
Spelling
The Spelling category is a helpful tool for content managers to easily see and correct spelling mistakes across their sites. However, because many sites contain scientific terminology that is not in the dictionaries that DubBot uses to run the spell check, the scoring for this category can be artificially low. If content managers notice a lot of scientific words flagging as issues in this category they may reach out to DubBot Support or caesweb@uga.edu to have them added to the account dictionary.
PDFs
While PDFs do not have their own category panel, they are listed separately on the site Dashboard on the Site Overview panel. This list will inform content managers where PDFs exist on their sites and whether those PDFs have accessibility features or require remediation. This list should be sorted by the feature “PDF Tags” and any result that has a red “No” result in that column should be prioritized for removal or remediation.
Read about PDF results on DubBot’s Knowledge Base.
Scoring Goals
Because CAES uses DubBot primarily as a means to monitor and address accessibility concerns, the Overall Site Score should not be used for determining success for a site’s governance. The CAES Web Team will be using the Accessibility category’s score as the guiding metric instead.
Content Managers should be aiming for a minimum Accessibility score of 95% with zero ‘Critical’ issues reported.
While most issues content managers will see in the DubBot reports can be easily fixed, some are not as straightforward or require the assistance of the web development team. Visit our article about DubBot Flags You Can’t Fix to get an overview of what these issues may look like and how to get help.
The CAES Web Support Team is happy to help with any questions about DubBot results. Please reach out to us at caesweb@uga.edu or submit a work request.
