Community colleges were established to serve the public by offering them access to affordable quality education. However, we can only say that a college fulfills its mission when its courses and facilities, including websites, learning content, and online applications, are fully accessible to individuals with disabilities. Let’s learn more about a few digital accessibility best practices your institution should implement, such as being aware of accessibility issues and using an accessibility checker.
Before making any changes to your website and other digital media, you should determine what you need to improve. You can start by gathering feedback from students and faculty with disabilities as their input will be useful. You may also refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), containing a comprehensive list of accessibility success criteria such as image alt text, color contrast ratios, and the proper usage of headings and subheadings.
Aside from asking users with disabilities and doing your research on the WCAG, you should also conduct an accessibility check on your website. Accessibility checks can use manual, automated, hybrid, and functional methods.
Manual accessibility checking involves checking the website at the code and display levels for potential accessibility issues. Automated accessibility checking uses an accessibility checker software to scan your website’s HTML code to identify WCAG violations. A hybrid method uses a combination of manual and automated checking, while a functional check involves a live tester attempting to perform specific tasks on your website using either a keyboard or a screen reader.
These accessibility checks will generate a list of potential accessibility violations. You can use this list to prioritize action items for remediation and plan future web or app development process adjustments.
The journey to digital accessibility does not stop at a single accessibility check and remediation cycle. You should also address potential violations while adding more content pages to your website. Deploying an automated accessibility checker on your website will help you identify potential issues on new pages before they go live on your website. However, you will still need to perform manual accessibility checks periodically to help you identify issues that the accessibility checker might have missed.
A few accessibility checks and remediations do not guarantee full digital accessibility in your institution. Being consistent with your accessibility policies is the only way to ensure that each web page, mobile app, or online learning module is accessible. This begins by educating your instructors, learning designers, web developers, and other academic and non-academic staff on the basics of digital accessibility using the WCAG as a discussion guide. Once they know the basics of accessibility, they will be able to identify potential problems and report them to your web development and accessibility compliance teams.
Building a digitally-accessible campus is not exclusively the job of web developers, instructional designers, video editors, or other people who create websites, apps, and other digital media. Everyone has a role to play in fostering a culture of accessibility across the institution. Accessibility starts with making an internal commitment to understanding the needs of individuals with disabilities and actively making an effort to address those needs. Training key members of the academic community on the basics of digital accessibility will go a long way in ensuring that every student, faculty member, or administrator can learn and contribute to the college’s body of knowledge, regardless of their disability status.