What are the Best Practice checks?

Summary

Best Practice checks extend beyond WCAG compliance to improve real-world user experience by guiding correct ARIA usage, strengthening content structure, and reinforcing accessibility patterns validated by experts and user feedback.

Overview

Best Practice checks in Siteimprove are designed to complement WCAG requirements by focusing on implementation quality and usability improvements. They provide additional guidance to ensure accessibility efforts are effective, consistent, and aligned with proven standards from the accessibility community.

Types of best practice checks

ARIA Best Practices

ARIA Best Practices. These checks help track the quality implementation of ARIA – ensuring it’s correctly implemented and used.

Siteimprove Best Practices

Siteimprove Best Practices. Checks related to content and code that have a significant impact on user experience but are not covered by WCAG. These include best practices that have been adopted by experts within the accessibility development and design community as an extension of the published web content accessibility guidelines.

Examples of best practice checks

One example could be “Presentational image has accessible name” so critical information about the image is included in the description. Another example is detecting the use of heading tags on a page (H1, H2, H3) which enable screen reader users to navigate a page much quicker.

Why include best practices in your site target

Importance alongside WCAG compliance

Why you should include Accessibility best practices as a part of your target.
We understand that compliance with WCAG is likely your most important goal. However, we’ve also incorporated best practice checks into the DCI score because these have shown, through feedback from real users, to have a significant impact on user experience.

Guidance for consistent implementation

The checks are designed to guide designers, developers, and content contributors in implementing accessible code and content correctly and consistently.

Ensuring effectiveness of accessibility efforts

When effort is made by your organization to make changes for accessibility, with our built-in best practice checks we are helping you to ensure these changes are effective.

Recommendation

For this reason, we highly recommend adding best practices to your organization’s overall site target.

Key takeaways

• Best Practice checks extend beyond WCAG to improve usability and implementation quality
• ARIA checks ensure correct and effective use of accessibility attributes
• Siteimprove Best Practices address impactful gaps not covered by WCAG
• Real-world user feedback informs these checks
• Including best practices strengthens the effectiveness of your accessibility strategy