Digital Accessibility
Digital accessibility refers to "how usable a website, app or other digital experience is by all possible users, regardless of their ability or disability" (Perkins School for the Blind).
W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) Web Accessibility Initiative
- Strategies, standards, and supporting resources to help you make the Web more accessible to people with disabilities.
- Accessibility Fundamentals Overview - Getting started with accessibility.
- Resources for Trainers and Educators - Provides a starting point for information that is particularly relevant to trainers and educators.
- W3C Accessibility Standards Overview - Introduces guidelines and other standards related to web accessibility.
- WCAG 2 Overview - Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) international standard - WCAG documents explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.
WebAIM: Web Accessibility in Mind, Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice, Utah State University
- Includes resources to help with accessibility training, technical assistance, accessibility in procurement, evaluation and reporting, and much more
- WebAIM's 2024 accessibility evaluation of the top 1,000,000 home pages found:
- 96% of pages had WCAG 2.0 failures.
- Home page complexity “increased significantly” since 2023, “from an average of 1050 elements in February 2023 to an average of 1173 elements per home page in February 2024—an 11.8% increase.
- Average of 57 errors per page (a notably increase since the 2023 analysis which found 50 errors/page).
- 96% of all errors detected fall into these six categories:
- Low contrast text
- Missing alt text
- Missing labels
- Empty links
- Empty buttons
- Missing language
WAVE - Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, Institute for Disability Research, Policy, and Practice, Utah State University
- A suite of evaluation tools that helps authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. Tools include browser extensions for testing accessibility, API and Testing Engine, and Accessibility IMpact (AIM) assessment reports.
- Developed and made available as a free community service by WebAIM at Utah State University. Originally launched in 2001, WAVE has been used to evaluate the accessibility of millions of web pages.
- Use the WAVE tool to test your webpages and see how accessible they are to visitors, including those with different disabilities. Then take the results and make the suggested changes.
Asking the Right Questions for Procuring Inclusive, Accessible Technology, EDUCAUSE (2021)
- Consensus best practices for evaluating the accessibility of vendor products are now incorporated into the Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT), a tool for product security, streamlining vendor risk assessment.
Research Brief: Digital Access for Students in Higher Education and the ADA, ADA National Network (2021)
