Accessibility Guidelines

St. Edward's University is committed to accessibility of stedwards.edu for all audiences. As a result, we purchased Siteimprove, a tool that helps us maintain and improve the website experience.

You will find Siteimprove to be a great resource for topics such as broken links, misspellings, and alt text for images. These are all important topics that help create ideal user experiences for your website visitors.

We encourage everyone to watch the Platform Overview Webinar for New Users since it is a great walkthrough for a new user to the Siteimprove platform. We have highlighted certain minute marks below that reference our initial focus topics of fixing Broken Links, Misspellings, and Alt Text Images.

Step #1 Watch the short Webinar: Platform Overview Webinar for New Users

• CMS Deeplinking feature has been enabled to make for easy navigation between the Siteimprove platform and the website CMS.

Step #2 Learn to update your broken links

• In Siteimprove, navigate from the Main Menu > Quality Assurance > Links > Broken links
• Helpful hint: Disable CSS or Enable HTML to make broken links more evident
• Login to CMS to fix errors

Resources: Broken Links in Platform Overview Webinar (14:05) and Step by Step Directions for Broken Links

Step #3 How to identify and correct misspellings

• In Siteimprove, navigate from the Main Menu > Quality Assurance > Spelling > Find Misspellings
• Helpful hints: Add Words Tab for dictionary terms, Thumbs up adds to dictionary, Thumbs down marks as misspelling
• Login to CMS to address misspellings

Resources: Misspelling in Platform Overview Webinar (22:50) and Step by Step Directions for Misspellings

Step #4 How to include Alt Text for Images

• In Siteimprove, navigate from the Main Menu > Accessibility > Issues > Sorting Options
• Login from the CMS to update Alt Text

Resources: Alt Text in Platform Overview Webinar (43:00) in Image Alt Text Best Practices

Additional Trainings, Certifications, and Siteimprove Academy

St. Edward's expects all websites on stedwards.edu to be accessible. While our CMS templates take care of many compliance issues for you, if you maintain the content on a University webpage, you must learn and understand the basic rules of accessibility and how to keep your site accessible.

Educate your team and designate time to test

Ensure your team knows SEU's accessibility testing tools and consult SiteImprove to mitigate accessibility issues.

Provide a straightforward way for users to communicate problems with your site

Keep all lines of communication open and make it easy for users to contact you. If phone or email contact is not preferred, consider building a contact form in Google Forms or Qualtrics.

Test your site frequently.

Take advantage of accessibility testing tools and SiteImprove to keep your site compliant.

Self-Service Testing Tools

Siteimprove
St. Edward's content owners can take advantage of Siteimprove. This app includes accessibility tools that allow you to control WCAG 2 A, AA, and AAA barriers that damage user experience and brand reputation. Siteimprove pinpoints issues via on-page and in-code highlights, allowing you to jump right into our CMS and fix accessibility issues right away.

axe Browser Extension
A free Axe browser extension for Chrome and Firefox or native mobile apps. It is simple to use, doesn’t require advanced accessibility knowledge, and won’t waste your time with false positives.

Color Contrast Analyzer by the Paciello Group
The Color Contrast Analyzer helps you determine the legibility of text and the contrast of visual elements, such as graphical controls and visual indicators. Learn more about color contrasts and the SEU palette.

WAVE Browser Extensions
Evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within your browser. The extension can check intranet, password-protected, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages. Also, because the WAVE extension evaluates the rendered version of your page, locally displayed styles and dynamically generated content from scripts or AJAX can be assessed.

Newsletters

Accessibility in the News
Microassist's newsletter includes articles and blogs, conferences and training, and a listing of accessibility resource pages.

Accessibility Now News
A monthly newsletter from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). It provides you with a digest of curated news clips that highlight issues and developments affecting the accessibility industry.

Knowbility
A nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas and an award-winning leader in accessible information technology. Each year, they directly serve more than 1,000 people through the OpenAIR program and training/ consulting services.

Development Tips & Links to More Information

• Develop to current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to Level AA
• Develop to the current Section 508 accessibility standards
• Use HTML elements as they're intended to be used
• Ensure that all actions can be performed using just a keyboard
• Use plain language
• Use high color contrast (dark gray on white instead of light gray on white)

Testing is the first step toward determining if your website is accessible to people with disabilities, including those using assistive technologies like screen readers, screen magnifiers, switch controls, etc.

Technical Standards

The Siteimprove tool can go a long way in helping you find broken links, misspellings, and missing "alt text" on your images. However, there are also many simple rules to follow that will help you build web pages that are accessible from day one.

Provide appropriate alternative text

Always provide a textual alternative to non-text content—like photos and illustrations—on your web pages. This is especially helpful for people who rely on a screen reader to read the website's content.

Allow users to skip repetitive elements on the page

Provide a method that allows users to skip navigation or other repeating elements on every page. This is usually accomplished by providing a "Skip to Main Content" or "Skip Navigation" link at the top of the page, which jumps to the main content of the page.

Ensure links make sense out of context

Every link should make sense if the link text is read by itself. Screen reader users may choose to read only the links on a web page. Phrases like "click here" and "more" should be avoided.

Prioritize Text Clarity

The greatest obstacle for visually impaired users is text clarity, so designers should take every measure to increase legibility (clarity of letters) and readability (clarity of text blocks).

Provide appropriate document structure

Headings, lists, and other structural elements provide meaning and structure to web pages and can facilitate keyboard navigation within them.

Do not rely on color alone to convey meaning

The use of color can enhance comprehension but do not use color alone to convey information. That information may not be available to a user who is colorblind or uses a screen reader.

Caption and/or provide transcripts for media

Videos and live audio must have captions and a transcript. A transcription may be sufficient for archived audio.

Provide headers for data tables

Tables used to organize tabular data must have appropriate table headers (the "th" element). Data cells should be associated with their appropriate headers, making it easier for screen reader users to navigate and understand the data table.

Ensure accessibility of non-HTML content

PDFs, Word files, and other non-HTML content must be as accessible as possible. If you cannot make it accessible, consider using HTML instead or, at the very least, providing an accessible alternative. PDF documents should also include a series of tags to make them more accessible. A tagged PDF file looks the same, but it is almost always more accessible to a person using a screen reader.

Make sure the content is clearly written and easy to read

There are many ways to make your content easier to understand. Write clearly, use clear fonts, and use headings and lists appropriately.