EWe understand that your scores in the Siteimprove tool are sometimes affected by issues that are out of your control. These are often code-related at the platform level and deal with accessibility or SEO. To keep you informed of what we’re addressing, please see the list below. It will be updated as we work on the issues.

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But first, see the list of site-specific issues that you can fix with content changes.

But first, see the list of site-specific issues that you can fix with content changes.

Site-Specific Issues For Content Managers to Address

Module

Issue Description

Priority Level

How You Can Fix

Accessibility

Heading issues

Be sure to use heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) in hierarchal order and nest them where appropriate. Visitors who use assistive technology lose relative importance of content when heading tags are not in order.

SEO

Mobile Speed

Speed can be affected by the size of images. Make sure images are .jpg format and optimized in size for web. Large images and .png format will slow the speed.

SEO

Desktop Speed

Speed can be affected by the size of images. Make sure images are .jpg format and optimized in size for web. Large images and .png format will slow the speed.

SEO

Navigation depth beyond 5 levels

Consider the hierarchy that you need for each section. Can the navigation be simplified, combined, etc.?

SEO

Pages with iFrames

Consider if the iFrame is necessary. Can you link to the content rather than embed it?

SEO

Pages with low text-to-code ratio

On pages where there is very little content, you may be able to combine content.

Guide to Priority Levels

Fix these issues first to make the most impact on the accessibility of your site.
These issues can affect usability and content quality.
You may not necessarily need to fix these issues, but they are recommended guidelines to keep in mind.

Platform-Wide Issues

Recently Fixed

We fixed an issue that caused the "Add to Calendar" button on Events to be broken.

Work in Progress

The element ID for the submit button on Search and Webforms is the same. We are working to change the element ID of the Search button.

Metadata serves external sites like Facebook or Google and may have a SEO impact on what appears there.

Identified on Our Roadmap

Need to review the "aria-labelledby" attribute to ensure it accurately describes the element.

Need to review the HTML5 or WAI-ARIA landmarks to ensure they’re appropriately applied so that visitors who use screen readers can navigate more easily.

Researching appropriate heading levels for embedded content.

Researching whether there is any styling that we can remove from the HTML in the iFrame code.

Researching appropriate text alternatives for links.

Reviewing page elements.

We Can’t Fix

SI flags the node path (ID of the content) that's used in the LinkIt (autocomplete URL) field. This is how GovHub works: The node path redirects to the friendly alias path.

This only occurs on some color palettes during the hover/active state of links.

False Positives

This occurs with third party embeds (like YouTube videos or Incognito forms). The title attribute is supplied from the host site, but is not being recognized when SI crawls the website.

Please note: We cannot control any additional markup to add alternative text outside of the title with third party embeds.