Silktide & Modern Campus Remediation Training Recap

Understanding Silktide Scores

When you access Silktide and select a website from your portfolio, the dashboard displays four aggregate scores: Content, Accessibility, Marketing, and User Experience. For compliance purposes aligned with the DOJ Title II deadline, we focus exclusively on the Accessibility score, though the Content score merits review for quality assurance. The accessibility score is calculated using automated checks, assisted checks, and weighted severity classifications for each identified issue. A score of 90% or higher represents our institutional target and indicates a site that meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards with only minor, non-critical issues remaining.

A functionally perfect page score under current conditions is actually 94% to 95% due to global template errors outside your remediation authority. These issues include problems in the navigation menu, search field, and footer that appear uniformly across all university web properties. Marketing Communications is collaborating with the Modern Campus vendor to remediate these centrally. When the updated templates deploy, your accessibility scores will automatically increase by approximately 5 to 6 points without any additional effort on your part. In the interim, direct your attention to the content areas you can control: the main body sections of your web pages.

Pages vs. Checks: Choosing Your Workflow

Silktide provides two distinct approaches to remediation, and selecting the appropriate workflow significantly impacts your efficiency. The Checks view presents every error type across your entire site, organized by severity or frequency. This view can be strategically useful when you want to address a single issue type across all pages in one focused session. For example, you might choose to remediate all ambiguous links site-wide using this approach. However, for most content managers, the Checks view becomes overwhelming because you move between pages without achieving a sense of completion on any individual page.

The recommended workflow begins with the Pages view. Identify a high-priority page (your homepage, primary program overview, or most frequently visited landing page) and address all its errors within a single remediation session. Correct the links, add alternative text to images, verify heading hierarchy, and resolve color contrast issues. When that page achieves compliance, proceed to the next priority page. This page-by-page methodology provides measurable progress and ensures you are not leaving partially remediated work distributed across your site.

After you have addressed your top 10 to 20 pages, you can effectively use the Checks view to identify patterns. If missing alt text continues to flag hundreds of instances, you may benefit from batch-processing those images. However, beginning with the Pages view keeps the remediation work cognitively manageable and strategically focused.

The Modern Campus Integration

One of Silktide's most valuable features for TTU users is its direct integration with the Modern Campus content management system. When reviewing a page's errors in Silktide, you will find a CMS button in the toolbar. Clicking this button launches you directly into the Modern Campus editor for that specific page, eliminating the need to manually navigate folder hierarchies or search for the correct file in the directory structure. The integration takes you immediately to the editing interface for the flagged page.

Modern Campus provides two editing modes: a visual WYSIWYG editor and a source code view. If you are comfortable working with HTML, the source code view offers precise control over semantic elements including headings, lists, and ARIA attributes. If you prefer a more graphical interface, the visual editor is entirely adequate for most accessibility corrections. Regardless of which mode you select, save your modifications, publish the updated file, and return to Silktide. The platform requires several minutes to re-crawl the page, but once the crawl completes, you can retest to confirm your remediation was successful.

Handling Global Template Errors

When you review your pages in Silktide, you will observe that certain errors appear on every page in identical locations: the navigation menu, the contact footer, the search field. These are global template issues, and they fall outside your remediation scope. Marketing Communications is working directly with the Modern Campus vendor to address these issues centrally. When the updated templates deploy across the university, every page will automatically inherit the corrections without requiring individual page-level intervention.

Common global errors include improperly marked up lists in the navigation menu, links that fail to indicate they open in new tabs, keyboard focus issues in dropdown menus, and missing skip navigation links. You can identify these errors by their consistent appearance in the same location and in the same form across all pages. Do not allocate time to attempting manual fixes on individual pages. These issues are documented and will be corrected through the global template update process.

In the interim, focus your remediation efforts on errors unique to your page content: ambiguous links within your paragraphs, missing alt text on your images, improper heading structure in your main content areas, and color contrast issues in your custom graphics. These represent the errors within your direct control and should receive your immediate attention.

Using Silktide's Learn Function for Spelling

The Content tab in Silktide flags potential spelling errors, but not every flagged term represents an actual mistake. Technical terminology, proper nouns, university-specific vocabulary, and standard abbreviations frequently trigger the spell checker despite being correct. Examples include "e-Raider," "TTU," "Omni," and "WCAG." When a term is genuinely correct, you can use the Learn function in Silktide's interface to add that word to the platform's dictionary for your site, preventing it from appearing as an error in future scans.

To learn a word, navigate to the Content tab, select Spelling, and click on the flagged term. A Learn button will appear in the interface. Click this button, and Silktide will add the word to its recognized vocabulary for your site. This refinement maintains accurate content scoring and prevents you from repeatedly addressing false positives. However, if a flagged word is actually misspelled, you must access Modern Campus and correct it at the source. Do not use the Learn function to mask genuine errors simply to improve your numerical score.