Web accessibility in higher education
NAU strives to create and maintain inclusive, accessible, and usable environments. We want every university setting—whether physical or virtual—to be useful to everyone. Creating an accessible web environment involves following ADA compliance rules for alt text, color contrast, and reading order.
Why is web accessibility important?
As members of the modern world, we have grown to expect fairness, justice, and inclusion for every human being. In many countries, accessibility is a right protected by law. However, the structures we’ve inherited from the past don’t always guarantee equal access. In addition, an accessible design will ensure that assistive technology can function properly.
For a university like NAU, accessibility means taking an intentional look at what we offer and evaluating where we can make improvements to better serve our community. The A11Y Project provides a wealth of resources for you to learn more about accessibility.
Higher education accessibility in 2012
In 2012, the University of Washington created a video of national university leaders discussing campus accessibility that illustrates how universities planned to become more accessible. The page includes an accessible video with captions, descriptions, a downloadable transcript, and video download options. Accessibility benefits everyone.
What does it mean to be an accessible institution?
“Accessibility generally means that a product or service is available to and usable by as many people as possible. In order to ensure accessibility, it is best to consider the needs of a wide variety of users at the time that we are designing our product or service, since rebuilding it later will take more time, effort, and resources than doing it well from the beginning.”
The future of accessibility is shaping up to be equity-focused design. This means that as a web designer, you consider all audiences from the beginning and create fair, equity-based opportunities for support that will enable all users to achieve their desired outcome.
How can we make our digital materials accessible?
There are a lot of resources out there for web accessibility. Here are some places to start:
- The Web Accessibility Initiative maintains a set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, known as WCAG (pronounced wick-ag), that describe how to make your web content fully accessible.
- The Faculty Room at the University of Washington offers resources about Universal Design.
Check your web accessibility with our printable checklist
University Marketing’s accessibility experts created this printable to help you master the basics.