Silktide Sitescore
© Jack Pickard 2005-2006
There's a company out there called Silktide who offer a free online check called Sitescore of five pages of your website for search engine profile, links to the site, website popularity, site response times, technologies used, features available, response times, accessibility tests, and user votes to give an overall average score.
It's a nice little facility, and while those who know me will know that I have very clear views on whether or not you should rely on the scores given to you by automated accessibility testers, I do use them because they are useful tools. Also, it's important to note that there's a lot more to Silktide's tests that just automated accessibility testing, and they've also shown a great willingness to listen to the accessibility community on AccessifyForum so I've got a lot of time for 'em.
I also happen to particularly like Silktide's Sitescore because if you qualify for a badge, they don't give you a link to an icon to slap on your site the whole time, no sirree sir. What they do is they give you a link which shows your site's current ranking. So, in the best traditions of unit trusts and endowment policies, the value of your icon can go down as well as up. At the time I wrote this, mine had a value of 8.4.
Please feel free to follow the link back to their site and vote for my site. Obviously I'd prefer it if you said you thought I was excellent...
I understand Silktide will be producing a more 'corporate' version of this system called Silktide Enterprise which is more suitable for testing larger websites. As I expect to see more of these badges once Silktide Enterprise is launched, I've also added the badge to my Accessibility Badges page.
I agree, it's a very nice tool, but like all of the competition it seems Silktide can't resist overplaying the value of automated testing. To quote from the report of the #1 rated site:
"All webpages were found to be fully compliant with the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and therefore likely not in violation of the British Disability Discrimination Act."
Those are totally bogus claims, so why do they feel the need to make them?
/grouch
That's a fair point Dan.
I would prefer it if they didn't use that phrase - because as we know it's not possible to fully test every checkpoint using automated tools. It would be better in my opinion if it said that they had passed Silktide's tests, which were based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
On the other hand, the likelihood is that if it passes the automated tests then I agree with them it is not likely they will be in violation of the DDA.
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