The University of West Florida utilizes a CMS to manage their website content which allows non-technical users to manage their own web content. While this is a great practice that allows UWF to output timely content, manually reviewing all content changes to ensure that they are inline with accessibility standards would create a bottleneck. With over 6,500 pages of content, scheduled, automated content reviews are also useful to catch unexpected issues that get introduced, like broken links to third-party websites.
UWF began utilizing DubBot as a website quality assurance tool in 2019. They set up sites within DubBot to allow their users to access the system’s reports and detailed issue locators for their specific departmental website responsibilities. Administrators access the account reports to be able to keep track of all issues across all web sections. UWF also leverages sitemap crawling to ensure all pages are inventoried accurately.
Having used DubBot for 3 years, administrators targeted what issues could be resolved simply by upgrading their website templates and other assets within the CMS. Certain issues that commonly appeared across many or all departmental websites could often be tied to centralized assets, so an update there would fix many occurrences with one action. UWF has significantly decreased overall accessibility issues throughout their website presence by targeting site-wide issues, having a worker on the centralized website team focus on specific issues and fix content, and using DubBot to identify common errors by departmental web managers and releasing educational materials on resolving issues or best practices. They were also able to utilize custom policies to quickly locate text that required updating throughout their web presence.
UWF administrators credit DubBot's lack of false positives, excellent customer support, and an easy-to-use interface as the main reasons they chose DubBot as their quality assurance tool.
"We have made extraordinary progress in resolving accessibility and quality assurance issues across uwf.edu since signing on with DubBot. Leveraging this tool while also working through a site-wide style and technical redesign has produced wonderful results for us, and their customer support has always been incredibly friendly and helpful anytime we have reached out. We are excited to continue using DubBot as we optimize even further and work towards a fully accessible, error-free web presence." - Jason O'Connell, Assistant Director of Web and Digital Strategy
