Why We Score Webpages and the Improvements We’re Making

17 Nov 2022

Our free Website Accessibility Checker and the RAMP platform have scanned and scored millions of webpages and applications. Along with specifying what on a given webpage doesn’t conform to WCAG standards, Accessible Web’s RAMP platform offers a numerical score to help our users prioritize their efforts and document progress over time. RAMP already makes the journey to offering an accessible digital experience easier to start and organize, and we are preparing to take this functionality even further.

To accommodate the exciting new features we’re preparing to release in the coming months, RAMP’s scoring system is about to get a lot smarter. So, starting on November 21, 2022, you may notice a change in your website’s accessibility score, even if you haven’t made any changes to the site. This is because our new scoring system will consider not only what and how many errors occur on a page, but also the impact of those errors and their prevalence across a given page.

Starting this Monday, scores will more accurately reflect the “real-world” impact of an accessibility violation. Automatically detected accessibility errors will impact your score differently based on the pervasiveness of the error across the page and across your website. For example, a page with color contrast issues in just the header will now receive a different score compared to a page with contrast issues in the header, footer, and body–with the latter scoring lower.

If you’re currently using our RAMP platform to monitor your website and organize remediation efforts, you may notice a slight change in the score of your website or webpages moving forward. This change won’t retroactively affect previous page scores.

If you aren’t using our RAMP platform yet, and you manage a website or web application, you can check it out for free here.