Silktide

Opinion piece on Silktide from an Accessibility Developer

Silktide is a lot of things but it includes an automated suite of accessibility testing tools. These run automated checks to allow a user dig down into the detail. The platform also generates an overall accessibility score.

Oh cool, that sounds useful?

Yes it does, however there are plenty of free tools can do automated checks to help in an organisation’s accessibility journey but ones that give you an overall “score” are not that common.

Ok, so?

Well, this score is being used as a proprietary benchmark to compare one website to another. Which in the context of accessibility does help in telling me how many automated errors they are. However not how accessible a site or user journey actually is.

How do they generate the score?

It’s not clear, it’s proprietary by design, there’s no way to see how a score is created and to scrutinise the methodology. They’ve refused to provide this on request. It might be linked to the number of automated errors that it picks up — the less errors equals a higher score.

Is their software accessible?

Short answer, it’s not clear but it doesn’t look good.

The software doesn’t have a public VPAT report. Whilst this is a voluntary report, they also refused to provide a 3rd party independent audit on request. Additionally, their accessibility statement doesn’t really say much about the software only the marketing website.

So the software providing accessibility tooling might not be accessible?

Most likely, refusing to make a VPAT report and an audit public is a red flag. It makes me wonder if they have something to hide and how committed they are to the work.

Additionally as this is business-to-business (B2B) software, disabled users that might use this software internally are not the budget holders for procuring or renewing this software subscription. So if there are issues they might be easily ignored.

The incentivisation structures seem to be setup for the company to sell a solution to leadership that are worried about accessibility that perhaps itself can’t be used by disabled users.

So SilkTide could simply commission a 3rd party audit and make it public on their website?

Yup — also, it appears that they made £1.6m in revenue in 2022/23.

Ok, wow anything else?

Another issue is they seem to be comparing websites against each other using this proprietary scoring using the Silktide index.

This is mixed bag, while it might create incentive for companies to compete on this score, it can create strange side-effects. Often leadership doesn’t understand accessibility and distilling this to a score can be unhelpful in terms of what is prioritised. Also, what is missing from all of this are the voices of disabled users.

At time of writing University of Ulster was rated #1 for higher education but taking a very quick look at their site there are issues with the design of the focus state being inconsistent which automated tooling can’t pick up.

Would you recommend it?

Short answer: no, not at the moment.

When I’ve asked them to make a VPAT public or provide an independent audit they’ve refused. That’s not to say it can’t be useful for your organisation. However, I wouldn’t expect this from a service that is committed to accessibility. There are plenty of other free tools that I would recommend before Silktide.

Are you worried they will retaliate or say bad things about you?

If they do instead of resolving the issues in their product, it actually re-confirms the entire article.