The size of our website means we take a sample approach to accessibility testing. This page explains how we determine which pages to test.
In order to ensure we test a wide sample of pages that reflects how people use our website, and its breadth of content, we create a sample of pages drawn from the following two categories.
Sample scope
Popular or 'common task' pages
Pages falling within this category are defined as 'most popular' based on traffic numbers over the course of the previous year. In addition to this, we sample a number of pages that fail to meet a minimum page view level, but have been identified as forming part of the user journey for common tasks carried out by our key website audiences ("prospective students", "students" , "researchers and academics", "the general public").
Complex pages
These are pages where complex behaviours or interactions are required of our audiences, regardless of how common those interactions are, or have functionality that may carry a high risk of being inaccessible. We determine complexity through two means:
A qualitative assessment
These are pages that:
- Have been reported as having accessibility issues by an individual or organisation.
- Have been identified as having a potential accessibility issue via our automated assessment tool. The university currently uses for this purpose.
- Have been identified as at 'complex', due to the way they are built or used, by the university's Digital Services team.
A quantitative assessment
These are pages that have experienced the highest average time spent on page, whilst receiving at least 1000 page views from external or student traffic, over the previous year.
Ensuring a broad range of content
To ensure an effective cross-section of content quality, sections selected for sampling are further categorised by content creator. By this, we mean the department responsible for creating the content. Where a section contains content from multiple university departments, we then draw an equal number of pages, at random, from all departments to ensure that content from each is assessed.
On average, the number of pages selected for auditing represents 5% of all pages on the university website. Further details on how our sampling process is carried out, or a list of pages sampled during the previous audit period, can be obtained by contacting us at accessibility@gre.ac.uk or by phone.