The importance of web accessibility: How being inclusive can improve your university’s website
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Do you struggle to get those around you to understand what accessibility is all about and what impact it has? You’re not alone. At SMILE, we’re keen to promote that accessibility should be embedded in your organisation’s culture – we don’t believe that it should be seen as a checkbox exercise.
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The importance of web accessibility: How being inclusive can improve your university’s website
- 1. The importance of web accessibility: How being inclusive can improve your university’s website IN ASSOCIATION WITH
- 2. Jennifer Chadwick Senior Accessibility and Digital Inclusion Strategist, Siteimprove Jennifer helps organisations develop their strategy for integrating accessibility and inclusive design into ICT deliverables and adopting a culture of inclusion. W3C Invited Expert and member of the IAAP and the ICT Accessibility Testing Committee.
- 3. Sarah Jones Digital and UX Manager, University of Gloucestershire Sarah heads up the digital team at the University of Gloucestershire where they have just launched a new website following a 2 year rebuild project. She has over 20 years’ experience of working with the web including a role at Dolphin Computer Access which ignited Sarah’s passion for accessibility and a user-first approach.
- 4. Nathan Monk Co-founder and Solutions Architect, SMILE
- 5. Thank you to Siteimprove for partnering with us on this webinar!
- 6. This is not a technical deep dive or explanation of the regulations (WCAG AA) wearesmile.com/webinar
- 7. 1. Accessibility is for everyone 2. It is a journey 3. Talk to people to understand more 4. Everyone is responsible
- 8. Q+A is open, and our poll is live!
- 9. The Facts People are people
- 10. People with disabilities use technology – telephones, smart TVs, websites, mobile apps, learning software, kiosk screens, voice assistants, etc. - every day. They have the right to do so freely without barriers and have equal access to online learning, their own personal information and student services online.
- 11. People with disabilities use assistive technologies and adaptive strategies to enable themselves and maintain their autonomy and independence, wherever possible. If your digital properties are inaccessible to these, you are causing the barrier. People are disabled by the lack of available channels, formats & options for engaging with your website, application or service - not the other way around.
- 12. Many people have invisible disabilities and/or may not self-identify as having a disability (they may not know it, and don’t have to). Populations are aging and people will continue to need simple, clear and effective interactions and communication. Cognitive disabilities and diverse neuro-abilities such as dyslexia, autism, ADHD and dyspraxia are being recognized in students earlier (and adults). Online learning allows for the flexibility of different models.
- 13. Apart from supporting the rights, needs and diverse abilities of the people across the UK, and in the world in general. Accessibility and inclusion is the right of all people to good services, good education, good business and the only acceptable standard of living. Inclusive design is an innovation in education and an investment in the future of society.
- 14. Become leaders - moving from: Institution causing barriers to “future ready”. A leader in technological innovation, inclusion and diversity in education. Fear of non-compliance; uncertainty to positive, people-centric institution with equipped, skilled and proactive teams. Feeling overwhelmed to allowing changes to take time. Start today and keep going. It can take 2-4 years to adopt and implement full change.
- 15. Inclusive design is an approach to user experience design for digital properties that takes into consideration the preferences, needs and abilities of all users as part of the original design. IDRC
- 16. Tips & tricks to get started 1. Shift the “social” model of disability 2. Think about everyone when writing and designing experiences 3. Don’t forget about language 4. Leverage tools 5. Learn from people
- 17. Watch people with diverse abilities using the web and mobile: Web Accessibility Perspective Videos Create personas & user stories for each disability type: WAI Diverse Abilities and Barriers Do’s and Don’ts on Designing for Accessibility (Gov.uk) Familiarise yourself with user needs
- 18. University of Gloucestershire Our website rebuild project: ● The goals ● The opportunity ● The challenges
- 19. University of Gloucestershire Working with accessibility ● Carrot or stick? ● Relatable examples ● Solutions not problems
- 20. ● New websites not a silver bullet ● Engage early ● Expect a learning curve (time) Embed accessibility into your operations
- 21. Example: Practice Support ● Have a conversation ● Prepare for challenges ● Empathise ● Solutions with added benefits
- 22. University of Gloucestershire Our strategy/ideas: ● Ambassadors ● Training ● Tooling ● Pathways for user complaints/issues ● Visible roadmap for users ● Share successes
- 24. 1. Accessibility is for everyone 2. It is a journey 3. Talk to people to understand more 4. Everyone is responsible
Editor's Notes
- Thank you so much for attending this webinar today called “The importance of web accessibility: How being inclusive can improve your university’s website” brought to you by SMILE and in association with our friends at SiteImprove. We have some really knowledgeable and talented speakers today. With accessibility as something of a hot topic, I think it’s really important that we are able to share our collective knowledge and empower one another to create a more inclusive internet.
- Our first speaker is Jennifer Chadwick, who is the Senior Accessibility and Digital Inclusion Strategist, Siteimprove. I’d like to take a moment to say thank you to Jennifer for all of her hard work up to this point. I have learnt so much listening to Jennifers experiences in putting this webinar together and I feel very privileged to be able to work with her on this. She is the definition of an expert in this space and a champion for digital inclusion.
- We’re also joined by the incredibly hardworking, and super talented Sarah Jones, from the University of Gloucestershire. I’ve been lucky enough to work very closely with sarah over the last 18 months on the brand new glos.ac.uk flagship website. And Sarah has been championing accessibility throughout the process. I invite sarah to this panel because I think she brings practical examples and valuable insight from the university perspective that I’m sure a lot of you will identify with.
- And for those of you that don’t know me, my name is Nathan. I am a co-founder and Solutions Architect at SMILE - a digital agency that strives to help universities and colleges become more authentic, timely and personalised with a suite of creative services and digital products. We work with over 40 different institutions from across the UK and North America and we are passionate about making universities and college websites more accessible.
- I wanted to give a shout out to SiteImprove today. Without their support, this webinar would not have been possible. SMILE is a silver SiteImprove partner and we really believe that SiteImprove is an incredible platform. We’ve used it with a number of university and college clients, and in particular the accessibility tools have been critical in the success of our clients projects. The platform is much bigger than accessibility, and everything else is just as fantastic. As far as tooling goes, this is easily one of the best. I really identify with how SiteImprove approaches accessibility reporting and leads digital teams to create more accessible sites. If you’re looking at tooling, you should definitely check Siteimprove out.
- I want to set some expectations here - we’re not going into the details of the double-A spec, international legislations, or anything like that. There’s tons of great resources on those things, and we’ve compiled those alongside some other great resources on our website at wearesmile.com/webinar
- But today, I’m excited to talk to you about how you can prove the importance of accessibility fundamentals to those that should care. And also some practical examples of how you can weave this into your culture. Accessibility is not a checkbox exercise, and I think as a sector, we’re in real danger of viewing it that way. If you do view it as just a tick in the box, not only are you shutting the door on a whole squadron of people, you’re missing the point too. Accessible websites benefit everyone. The example that made me realise is trying to watch the TV with a newborn baby in the house. The slightest noise would wake my daughter up when she was a baby. I’ve come to watch the television almost exclusively with subtitles. But accessibility is more than just a nice to have. It’s a fundamental. And as universities and colleges we are viewed a centers for good in our communities. People are looking to you, to set the example. So these four pillars are statements that the panelists and I were in total agreement over, and throughout you’ll see how relevant these are to their experience and journey.
- And speaking of journeys, the Q+A is now open. We’ll have some time towards the end where I’ll take your questions to the speakers, and we also have a poll, which is now live and we’ll be reviewing and sharing those results later too. So, without further ado, I’d like invite Jennifer from SiteImprove to the stage who is going to be talking us through “The Facts”.
- Shift the “social” model of disability: Accessibility is simply someone’s user experience. By providing it, you’re shifting the model from exclusive to inclusive. Writing and designing experiences: Don’t think of one user, but all five disability types – visual, auditory, physical, cognitive, speech. Choosing language: A barrier for those with learning difficulties or ESL students. Keep it plain, simple and concise; use headings, clear labels & helpful instructions. Leverage tools: Microsoft and Adobe have built-in accessibility checker tools. Learn from people: Whenever possible, involve real users for feedback - or create personas and review your content and design against what people need.
- Thank you Nathan for your introduction and Jennifer I can totally relate to the simple language thing, having a background in private sector websites, learning the HE jargon was an obstacle for me too! Learning to put yourself in a user’s shoes is vital to becoming better with accessibility and something I was lucky enough to experience firsthand and very early on in my career. Testing and researching with real users is insightful. We kicked off our website project just over 2 years ago, it’s fair to say it was largely a technical project focussed on replatforming from SharePoint as we were falling behind in terms of innovation and being fit for purpose so the goal was to move to something more future-proof and more easy to maintain. Better serving the needs of users was also a goal and a big opportunity. When you’re build something from scratch you of course have the opportunity to improve user journeys from a variety of angles, content, flow, design and of course accessibility. As you might guess, we opted to work with SMILE and that’s why I’m here talking to you today. Thank you Nathan. Accessibility was a concern area and a personal goal for me, being an area of interest since my work at Dolphin Computer Access. I’m happy to say the project has already been delivering on since the launch in mid Feb this year. Ultimately we all like choice, and being inclusive gives more people more choices. We’ve been on a bit of a journey and I’d like to share some of our learnings with you. Is it perfect? No, but we’re pleased that we’re in better shape than our old site and even than our peers. And we’re now set up with the tools and insights to continually improve.
- I think it can be really tempting to point the ‘stick’ of the law/regulations at people when you first introduce the concept of accessibility but for me this feels a bit heavy-handed and it might work with some types of people but I much prefer to talk about usability for ALL and use it as a bit of a carrot. As Jennifer and Nathan have alluded - accessible websites have so many benefits, not just to our users but also to us as digital content producers. Once you build empathy, each way, the buy-in is far greater and the motivation will grow naturally. When I talk to people, I also like to give them some relatable examples that as a user of the internet they will be able to empathise with themselves. As indicated by my punny slide and the carrot sticks, I do love food(!) so one of my favourite examples is visiting a website for a local restaurant - possibly even more relatable in recent times, maybe though you click on the ‘Menu’ link in the navigation to find it’s a PDF, with many pages and you have to pinch and zoom and scroll around to find stuff. This is a nuisance and compared to a well designed, responsive web page, not the best format for anybody let alone someone using assistive technology to gather information. Don’t land people with problems - give them solutions. They’re not likely technical so won’t think about the alternates quickly or readily. E.g. uploading videos to youtube, even if they won’t be accessed there is a shortcut to transcribing a video, in most cases people were delighted with this solution as it took away the pain of doing it manually and helps their content to be found on the search. Often people are really familiar with the bigger items or well known example like enabling captions on video or alt tags on images but it’s the slightly more code-based stuff that often is harder for both people to understand and web teams to monitor. Things like hierarchy in headings, link text or even front-loading sentences to allow skim reading. On very large websites, and when you’re copying over huge volumes of older content, this is where a tool can really create efficiency and catch problems you would otherwise miss or take a long time to find. It’s almost impossible to audit a website with over 7,000 pages like HE.
- The thing is, building a new website isn’t a silver bullet and of course isn’t necessary as the solution for better accessibility. I’m not here proclaiming we are now perfect and 100% accessible because honestly that isn’t the case and aiming for perfection is never realistic or good for morale! The important this is to embed accessibility within your processes and make sure it’s always considered in any digital project as early on as possible. I think a good strategy is to embed accessibility right from the start, thing like creating an accessible colour pallet for your brand can really highlight this in a visual way to colleagues. We have a spreadsheet with colours on showing when it passes contrast checks or not - the creative team weren’t always good at remembering this but they use it all the time now and have really embraced it. I hardly ever have to speak to them about anything to do with contrast now because it’s built into their thinking from the beginning of each asset they create. This stuff takes time though, I joined the university just over 2 years ago and this is still quite new to a lot of people outside my digital team and wider marketing department. Even now i’m asked when the deadline for accessible documents is and i have to tell them it passed by in 2018! One of the biggest hurdles with accessibility is for sure hosted documents. We had over 1500 docs on the old website and while some of them were unused and have been removed, there is still a range of information held in non-html files, things like forms, flyers, maps and even the prospectus for the 2021 starters. We began with a spreadsheet of these docs and got in with comms to the document owners during the early stages of our project. Hard to imagine as we’re embedded in web regulations but some people still think this is new and a future decline rather than an actionable, enforceable, finable law (probably different in the US). Now this question about accessibility sits within our website change request form - as you can see in the screenshot we ask people to confirm that they’ve either tested their document or are happy for it to be converted. Not only does this serve as a prompt but it saves us a lot of the back and forth we had to do by email.
- This is a great example with a happy ending. The placements team for our health students creates a large amount of PDF documents for us to host online. They’re not necessarily marketing or recruitment-focussed but we have to host them here for easy access when students and their external mentors are working off-site. To begin with it was a difficult conversation. People are busy, they are working to short deadlines and don’t like change in how they do things. At first there was resistance and even talk of building a personal satellite site to avoid the regulations. They may not think we have enough contact with typical accessibility users so at that point it’s really useful to explore how ALL users might need to access the content. Making it accessible of course makes it easier for everyone to access information. I think it’s always important to empathise and work with your colleagues, not against them. One of the objections to converting docs to HTML was that users often choose to print the user guides so they can look at them while using a third party website. Not everyone has multiple monitors like us digital people so talking about how it might be easier for someone to read the content on their smartphone while using their laptop was a selling point but also revealing the print-friendly work we’d done to allow the pages to be printed nicely was a plus. Often when you provide solutions for accessibility you are taking away some pain - we now can assign the content to them to keep updated themselves and this saves a rework in work, convert to PDF, contact someone to upload, following up when it’s done, etc. In this example, the member of staff I spoke with had used Wordpress before so giving them a login and showing them how they could create their own guides was a really simple solution. They now happily create articles themselves, directly into the CMS and have even further enhanced the content with video instructions and links between sections to make help easier to find through search. So the output is better and they feel good about creating something that’s better for everyone.
- This is a LOT, a lot of pages, a lot of documents, a lot of technical factors and a lot of colleagues. My advice is don’t take it all on yourself. It’s important to share the responsibility, create and train ambassadors around the institution who can beat the same drum. We’ve booked and held some training sessions and it was also an added bonus to find accessibility resources as part of the SiteImprove academy platform. Use some automation/tools - there are many out there. Humans can’t review 7,000+ pages - couldn’t do it without software to assist in the auditing process. We opted for SiteImprove and haven’t been disappointed. Don’t beat yourself up about imperfections - this takes time, it’s hard and it won’t happen overnight like a website launch can. Accept that you are on a journey and that isn’t just a statement on an accessibility notice, it’s the reality of our work. It takes a cultural shift and it also takes trust - i can be a bit of control freak but you have to let people and your tools do the work or it’s overwhelming. Don’t be afraid to challenge content that doesn’t meet the standards - workflows enable experts in your digital team to review prior to publish. People like this as backup. Consider other digital content - social media posts, videos on external platforms, job adverts, surveys, etc. We have a roadmap on work still to be done, visible in our accessibility statement and I think this earns some trust and goodwill. If we hold our hands up to imperfections and provide ways for people to work with us then that goes a long way. It’s also key to be clear on the route for enquiries and complaints. If someone needs to get in touch because they can’t access something the way they need to then you need to work out a way to handle these enquiries without bouncing them around internally. It shouldn’t be a surprise when this enquiry is received by your colleagues. Finally, monitor the results, measure satisfaction and share your good news stories to help motivate others and reward efforts.
- Nathan: Thank you so much Sarah, and of course Jennifer too. I’m sure everyone will agree that there is some really useful information that’s been shared with us today. I’d like to take the next few minutes to throw some questions at you. We’ve had some great questions come in from our audience today.
- Well I’m afraid that’s all we have time for today. I hope you’ve enjoyed this webinar from SMILE, in association with SiteImprove. I also hope that you’ll agree that accessibility benefits everyone, but it is also everyone’s responsibility. I hope that you can find new ways to approach and talk to people to learn more about the things that you can do to help. And most of all, I hope that you can use those pointers from Jennifer to start building your roadmap for your accessibility journey. It’s a long road ahead, and I’m sure you’ll have some awkward conversations along the way - but you are centers for good in the community and if you can be truly inclusive, I am hopeful that others will follow suit. Remember accessibility is not a checkbox exercise, it can change lives.
- I hope that you have enjoyed this webinar, and please check out the resources on our website, and if you’re not already, then subscribe to our mailing list for updates on more webinars from SMILE. We have a great student marketing insight webinar coming up that is going to be a blast. On behalf of the panellists, SMILE, SiteImprove and myself: Thank you so much for attending and have a great day.