Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

The Digital Certainty Index® (DCI®) is a measure of the quality and potential impact of a website's digital presence, including its accessibility and usability, its credibility and trustworthiness, and how well-poised it is to respond to SEO challenges.The final DCI score is calculated as an overall score of points awarded in three categories: Accessibility, Quality Assurance, and SEO.

Find out more about Digital Certainty Index.

Obtaining a score of 100% is the overall goal. Working toward, and maintaining, this goal will be an ongoing process.

There are currently flagged accessibility issues within Siteimprove that will prevent a website from reaching the 100% score goal. Many of these issues present within the WCMS site template and will need to be fixed by our development team.

View our Siteimprove known issues and learn how to add to the list.

Accessibility issues flagged within Siteimprove represent issues that do not conform with the selected criteria. The University of Waterloo has committed to conform with Level AA of the WCAG 2.0 for all public websites.

The site target cannot be edited.

Find out more about the site target.

The industry benchmark is the average score for websites using Siteimprove in Canada and within the Education industry.

On the Dashboard, you can see the overall DCI industry benchmark, a minimum score of 85.2, along with the industry benchmark for the individual modules Quality Assurance, Accessibility, and SEO. To view the industry benchmark score hover over the dot on the individual scores.

Find out more about the industry benchmark.

This accessibility work is a focused and continued effort for the duration of the lifespan of the website. The University strives to have each website compliant, at the 100% score, by December 2025.

No, Siteimprove does not crawl any content that requires authentication. It also does not crawl content in a draft or archive state.

If a site hasn't had a successful crawl for months, the Siteimprove platform continues to index old content that was published months ago because the updated content hasn't been crawled successfully yet. In other words, if a crawl fails, ​Siteimprove will continue to display the old content from the last successful crawl.

If a crawl is successful, then Siteimprove should not be crawling and indexing old content that is now archived. It should only be crawling published and publicly available content.

Administrators (Website leads) can submit suggestions for specific words or spellings to be added to the Siteimprove dictionary so they are no longer flagged as misspellings across the entire platform. Please submit a Siteimprove support request.

Administrators and Content authors are able to allow for specific spellings to be allowed/disregarded across the websites within their own profile.

Learn more about spelling decisions.

Yes. The websites in your profile can be sorted using Tags, and the widget for the module you wish to report on added to a new or existing Dashboard. Multiple module widgets can be added. A report can then be generated or scheduled.

Learn more about creating a report for sites filtered by tags.

Users can view and manage the reports emailed out from Siteimprove by:

1. Clicking on your name in the top right corner and selecting My profile.

2. Select the Reports menu link.

3. Click on “See and edit classic QA reports” and select which sites should be sending out report information for each user.

By default, users will only receive report information on the sites and groups that they have been authorized to view (edited in site access settings).

We are unable to support PDF remediation at this time, though we are working toward a campus-wide support solution.

Please review the Accessibility overview courses page and those resources offered by Siteimprove Frontier training and Help Center.