Accessibility and inclusion: Improved accessibility tool coming soon
This month, we share exciting news of a new tool for accessibility compliance.
Coming next semester: DubBot
Many of you have utilized the Monsido tool to identify broken links, misspelled words, and accessibility issues with your website. Accessibility compliance tools are improving every year, and in late 2022 the University of Maine System put out a Request for Proposal (RFP) to review what tools are available that best meet the requirements of our many university websites.
Proposals were received in January 2023, and after thorough review and discussion the team determined that DubBot offered features that would help our users better understand what accessibility changes are needed on their websites.
What makes this tool an exciting improvement?
- Its report interface puts accessibility/qa issues visually in context of the web page being analyzed, which reduces the time a user would need to find where a particular flagged item appears
- Reports can be shared with non-Dubbot users, making it easier to alert both site owners (who may not have a Dubbot login) and the site editors to issues that need to be addressed on sites
- The system has an integrated task management system that allows Dubbot users to assign tasks to other users for follow up, which is extremely useful when a site editor may find an issue that can only be remediated by another department/user
As we approach the debut of DubBot, Digital Communications will update our accessibility tool training to help you adopt this new and improved resource.