Colleges and universities are frequent targets for web accessibility lawsuits, and for good reason: If students can’t access online resources, they’re being denied an equal opportunity to succeed.
Many web designers employed by educational institutions have some understanding of web accessibility standards under Title II and III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). However, they’re not always the ones building the websites — or at least, not all of the websites.
We’ve worked with colleges that employ “page builders" to set up sites for laboratories, classes, and professors, which can help to ensure that each new site has a similar aesthetic (along with links to the institution’s primary website, accessibility statement, and so on). There’s certainly nothing wrong with that approach, and it makes sense at scale.
But the fact is that no website is fully compliant with web accessibility standards by default. Below, we’ll discuss how academic page builders can create a false sense of security, then provide some tips for improving compliance with the ADA and other laws.
Academic Website Builders Standardize Content, But They're Not Perfect
The good news is that page builders standardize content in very positive ways. If you’re starting from an accessible template with predefined form labels, good keyboard accessibility, and a basic framework that works well with assistive technologies, you’re starting from a solid foundation.
Unfortunately, a template can’t prevent many of the most serious accessibility barriers. Some examples that we’ve seen:
- A laboratory website used an image of their staff standing in bright outdoor lighting as the background for their home page. That created contrast issues with the white text that appeared over the image (the text was virtually unreadable for all users, regardless of their abilities).
- A professor added their email address to a “contact" page, unaware that the template already included the link by default. That introduced redundant hyperlinks, which can be confusing to people who use screen readers and other assistive technology (AT).
- A professor uploaded several PDFs to their school website. While the rest of the site was accessible, the PDFs were not properly tagged. Moreover, the professor had no idea that PDFs were supposed to be tagged!
- A graduate student uploaded multiple images of a laboratory’s experiments and added alternative text for each image. However, that text was extremely descriptive — and when reading the site with a screen reader, the excessive alt text made the content fairly redundant.
All of these issues are easy to fix. However, remediating an error will take more time than preventing that same error. By reviewing your university’s publishing process — and building some checks into that process — you can address most barriers before they impact students or staff.
Tips for Creating Accessible Websites
If you’re building a website with a college page builder, we recommend checking out our Definitive Website Accessibility Checklist. You can also read through WCAG, which is the standard for compliance with the ADA, European Accessibility Act (EAA), and dozens of other digital accessibility laws.
With that said, here are some simple ways to avoid common mistakes while building digital accessibility into your school’s online publication process:
- Make sure authors understand how alt text works and why it’s important. Often, alt text is too short, too long, or redundant — but when authors get into the habit of thinking about how the alt text affects the presentation of the content, they tend to make better decisions. Related: 5 Steps for Writing Alt Text for Accessibility
- Test content for color contrast issues prior to publication. Free tools like AudioEye’s Color Contrast Checker can handle this for you.
- Start with an accessibility-friendly template. The template should follow WCAG’s guidelines for color contrast, keyboard accessibility, and so on — if the template isn’t accessible by default, every single author will need to change the settings (which will inevitably lead to serious accessibility barriers).
- Include digital accessibility in how-to guides and training materials. Once again, focus on the why. When people understand how accessibility impacts their audience, they create better content.
- Don’t forget about PDFs, multimedia, and other types of content! Videos need captions, podcasts need transcripts, and PDFs need proper tags.
- Make sure your accessibility statement is accurate. It’s okay to publish a statement of partial conformance, which acknowledges that you’re still working to correct some issues, or that some issues are out of your control. Remember to write the accessibility statement in plain language and give readers a way to report issues that they encounter.
To discuss accessibility questions with a subject matter expert, send us a message.