UPDATE: Global Reports have been archived as of March 2021.
Some months ago we presented the Rocket Validator Leaderboards, which ranked sites from US and UK Higher Education, and European Parliaments, to see how they ranked in their conformance of accessibility and HTML markup standards.
The idea was generating a list of the major sites to get the pulse on how they were performing, but after a while we saw that the main idea was misunderstood: relying so much on concepts as scores and rankings transmitted the wrong idea. One cannot simply give an absolute score on a site based on automated checks - manual testing is always needed.
Still, automated testing is a great help that takes a lot of work out of the way on a first pass. Having automated tools that can scan thousands os pages in search for well-known issues makes totally the difference.
This is why we’ve removed scores and rankings from those lists, and no longer call them “leaderboards”. This is not a competition, we just want to show facts.
Today, we introduce the Rocket Validator Global Reports - we’ll monitor reference sites on different fields like higher education and public administration, and will show the accessibility / HTML issues found on their pages.
- United States Education Accessibility & HTML Global Report
- Canada Education Accessibility & HTML Global Report
- United Kingdom Education Accessibility & HTML Global Report
- European Parliaments Accessibility & HTML Global Report
How Accessibility / HTML Global Reports Are Calculated
We check the participant sites using the latest versions of the axe-core accessibility engine and the W3C Validator on up to 100 pages from each site.
Based on these checks we produce a detailed report for each page on the checked sites, including A11Y and HTML issues, and also a summary report with the common issues on each site.
These sites are scheduled to re-check periodically, so it's a live report that will reflect changes when new issues are found or fixed.