My policies screen

This screen shows all of your enabled policies, and any violations of those policies.

Policies screen in Silktide

Policies are custom rules and checks for a website. For example, policies can check for specific pieces of text, code, or more complex conditions.

You can choose to view policies by role – e.g. for editors, or designers – by clicking on the appropriate tab.

Policies which are violated are shown first, with the highest priority policies first. The estimated difficulty and number of matches for the policy are shown on the right-hand-side:

Table listing some example policies

Policies which have no violations are shown at the bottom, with a green tick next to each one.

You can set the difficulty and priority of a policy when you create or edit the policy.

Viewing results for a policy

Click on a policy to see what, if anything, it matches:

The description for the policy is shown at the top (in the screenshot, “Generally long words should be avoided…”) along with the difficulty and responsibility of the policy. You can customize all of these when you create or edit the policy.

The chart shows how the number of matches for this policy have changed over time. This is updated every time your website is retested, or when you make a decision that affects a policy.

You can view matches by the pages they appear on (“Pages”), and individually (“Matches”). Use the tabs provided to select the view you want. Either list can be exported by clicking on the Export button.

If you click on the magnifying glass icon, you can view individual matches on a specific page:

Ignoring matches

Sometimes you won’t want to act on a match – for example, it may be highlighting something that isn’t a real problem.

If so you can choose to ignore them in one of two ways:

  1. Click Ignore on an individual match. This will ignore that specific match on that specific page only.
  2. Click Ignore page on the pages tab, or under the dropdown menu shown for an individual match. This will ignore all matches of this policy on this page, including any new matches that occur on that page in future.

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