Meeting Accessibility Requirements for Websites Hosted Off-Campus
- Jonathan Woolson
Why: All campus websites must comply with state SUNY Policy 6901, Federal ADA Section 508, and WCAG 2.1 AA standards. The overall intent of these policies is to provide all visitors with an “equivalent experience with equal access” to all information shared on a public website. An “equivalent experience with equal access” may mean that playing a video on the website must also offer closed captions and/or a transcript for a deaf visitor, or it may mean that the image of a graph is linked to a text description of the graph for a blind visitor.
Who: Campus staff who manage public websites that are hosted off-campus.
What: These Answers pages cover web accessibility issues for websites that are hosted off-campus. This website will continue to change with updates, so we advise “watching” (subscribing) to this space to receive notifications as the materials are updated. See Confluence Help at: Watch pages, spaces, whiteboards, and blogs | Confluence Cloud | Atlassian Support
How: Follow the model outlined in the SUNY Fredonia EIT Plan
When: The EIT Officer provides annual progress updates to SUNY System Admin for Fredonia’s accessible content.
Resources
WebAIM Checklist of Accessibility Issues with common steps to address them.
WebAIM Chrome Extension to locate common accessibility issues with a public website.
Siteimprove login to view your website’s accessibility errors, broken links, and misspellings.
OCR Videos The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) offers a video series on digital access in education, including how people with disabilities use technology, applicable Federal regulations, and identifying and remediating barriers to access.
Deque University provides trainings on meeting website accessibility requirements.
Accessibility Validation for manual and automated testing. Just because a website passes an automated accessibility test (i.e., Siteimprove) does not mean that the accessible content is both accurate and meaningful.
Responsibilities
Know the vendor process to identify and address accessibility issues.
Coordinate with the vendor to make needed changes to website that meet accessibiity standards.
Make content updates that meet accessibility standards and validate with tools like Siteimprove, WebAIM Evaluation Tool, and manual user testing.
Communicate and document the progress on providing accessible web content.