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Announcement: new accessibility partner

With a new year just starting, we are ringing in 2020 by announcing our new partnership with Silktide.

Superseding our relationship with Sitemorse, this will provide you with a more comprehensive, detailed and user-friendly service, helping you comply with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 before the 22 September 2020 deadline.

Our decision to source a new accessibility partner was made in direct response to your feedback. We listened to your criticisms of the existing service and to what you felt worked well. As a result, we have chosen, in Silktide, a web intelligence provider with a fresh, holistic and user-centric approach who add greater value to our offering while retaining all the original benefits.

From February 2020, Silktide will provide monthly reports which will all be provided at no charge to members. Sitemorse levied an additional fee for reports beyond Q1. Silktide reports are more frequent and available entirely without extra cost.

BetterConnected+ subscribers will benefit from:

  • Silktide analyses 125 pages and 25 PDFs of primary websites, considerably more than previously. ‘Highest level’ pages are scrutinised first, giving a fairer representation of the most crucial website components.
  • Websites are now also tested on a mobile device. This makes it possible to detect layout and accessibility issues that are a key requirement for WCAG 2.1.
  • A check highlighting potential spelling errors and more detailed recommendations, often accompanied by user-friendly educational video content and other helpful resources.
  • Further improvements include the removal of subjective and superfluous checks such as ‘do not use full stops within abbreviations’.
  • Scoring is much fairer, more relevant and measured out of 100 instead of the previous 10.

The new partnership also means that organisations whose scores require improvement will not be named publicly. Silktide only ranks the highest 30 performing websites and then lists the rest alphabetically.

This has been a remarkable year for Socitm. Established for over 30 years, we continue to challenge convention, inspire change and power progress. Our partnership with Silktide is a further demonstration of our commitment to evolving and flexing to meet the developing needs and wishes of our members in a disruptive and ever-changing environment.

We look forward to working with you in 2020.

If you’d like further information, email: hello@socitm.net