RAMP is the name of Accessible Web’s accessibility testing software. From automatic scanning to manual auditing, this toolset is your assistant in making your platform or portfolio accessible.
Let’s dive into some Key Concepts and Key Features you’ll run into while using RAMP. Understanding these key concepts and features will make using RAMP easier and, in turn, help you most efficiently improve your website’s accessibility.
Key Concepts
Organization
Your company, team, colleagues, whatever you call it. Organizations give groups of people shared access to the same resources (i.e., websites) in RAMP.
Website
Domains you add to RAMP. Add a single website for each domain you wish to monitor for accessibility violations in RAMP.
Page
Each page of your website. Your home page, about page, product pages, etc.
Accessibility Scan
The result of running the industry standard axe-core ruleset on a single page. This scan reveals accessibility issues that may exist on the page.
Accessibility Violation
What accessibility scans look for. These violations range from color contrast issues to missing labels on form fields. They are based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) success criteria.
Automated Accessibility Score
A numerical representation of a page’s accessibility based on its automated scan results. If a page scan reveals many violations, the score will be low. If a scan finds few violations, the score will be high.
The scale is from 0-100. Most web pages on the public internet would score about 75/100. If there are no violations from the automated scan, your site will receive a 100/100 score. Please note, that a score of 100/100 does not automatically mean your site is fully accessible.
We display scores both on a per page, and per website basis. Website scores are an average of page scores.
Conformance Goal and Ruleset
The WCAG ruleset and level of conformance (A, AA, AAA) that our system will use to scan your website’s pages for accessibility violations. We recommend WCAG 2.2 AA as a good starting point for most projects.
Recommendation
A group of similar violations found across your pages. A recommendation will include a difficulty rating and an estimated impact on your overall score. This impact illustrates the potential benefit to your score if you address the recommendation.
Remediation Task
Tasks to improve your web accessibility. You can create these from scan results, scratch, or recommendations. Our team sometimes refers to tasks created from recommendations as “smart tasks” because they contain helpful, dynamic metadata about the violations they reference.
You can sync tasks to your Jira workspaces with our Jira app if you’re on a RAMP Pro+ plan.
Workbook
Exist to aid in organizing manual accessibility audit results. Manual audits can sometimes produce many failures across many widgets. Workbooks let you organize these failures into logical pieces of work before delivering them as remediation tasks.
Log Entry
An improvement made to your website. You can create these from scratch or after completing a remediation task. Multiple log entries comprise your “Accessibility Log” — a timeline of accessibility progress which can be publically displayed in your A11y Center. Log entries can be public or private.
User Ticket
Reports received from users hitting accessibility roadblocks on your site. These can be created manually or automatically through user-submitted feedback on your website via the A11y Center.
Report
A summary of a website’s accessibility violations and progress over a period of time. In addition to our automated scanning charts RAMP offers easy-to-export site-level reports showing accessibility progress including a scanning summary, remediation activity, daily score changes, highest occurring violations, and more.
Key Features
A11y Center
An embeddable widget that you add to your website. Once loaded, it provides your users a place to submit accessibility feedback (user tickets), view your accessibility log (log entries), and see your Accessibility Statement. The A11y Center is NOT an overlay.
Accessibility Scanning
Scanning is the heart of RAMP. RAMP takes the pages from your website and runs accessibility scans on them according to a monitoring schedule. You may set scanning schedules for pages independently from your website’s schedule. You can also trigger on-demand accessibility scans.
Accessibility Trend Tracking
Your site changes over time, and so does its accessibility. Automatic trend tracking in RAMP highlights trends, improvements, and regressions on your accessibility journey.
Audit Grid
Found in the manual auditing tab within RAMP, the Audit Grid is a robust feature that simplifies the manual auditing process. Watch your visual representation of your manual audit fill-up. Here you can preview testing information and time estimates, follow auditing instructions, create remediation tasks, and more.
Accessible Web Helper
Our free browser extension! In addition to being home to the Guided Manual Audit tool, this extension provides unlimited axe-core scanning of ANY webpage at the click of a button. It is fantastic for spot checks, local development, or even looking for the perfect accessible color combination. RAMP integrates directly with this extension by allowing you to interact with accessibility scans and tasks live in your browser.
Guided Manual Audit Tool
Automated scanning is only half the pie. Manual auditing is the other half, and the Guided Manual Audit Tool, accessed through our free browser extension, is your solution to efficiently and thoroughly conduct accessibility audits. This tool walks you through manual tests to audit a page’s accessibility. These are the same steps and checks our audit team performs for our customers.
Jira Integration
RAMP Pro+ users gain access to a Jira integration which pushes audit results and remediation tasks to the popular project management software.
Log Entries
Log entries are a public account of improvements you have taken to make your site more accessible. They are a valuable risk mitigation tool to deter potential lawsuits.
Page Discovery
Adding your pages to RAMP manually would be a pain. Page discovery allows you to tell RAMP how to discover new and existing pages on your website. You can set up page discovery to routinely crawl your website looking for pages or provide an XML sitemap file.
Using Remediation Tasks
Our system automatically scans your website and groups common violations in order of frequency and severity, and we present them as recommendations.
Convert recommendations into remediation tasks to address them. As you address the violations contained and explained in the task, RAMP dynamically updates the violation, score, and page metadata associated with the task. Once RAMP detects that all of the underlying violations of the task are fixed, the task will automatically close and be marked as “Completed.”