Top five web accessibility challenges at Carleton
It’s been a few years since we looked at the most common accessibility issues that occur on Carleton websites.
The latest top five
Eighteen months into the migration of websites into cuTheme, we can see a slight adjustment in trends, which we are reporting to you here:
1. Link language
- link text is not telling a user what will happen if they click on a hyperlink
2. Link language is the text of the link
- link text is the URL of the page to be visited, or the email address of the person to be contacted
3. Issues in alt text for images –
- images that need alt text don’t have any; images that should not have alt text have it
4. Pages with incorrect heading hierarchy
- the style of headers on the page can help or hinder accessibility
5. There is too much text, or it is too complex
- for everyone’s sake we need to write less, and more simply.
We will take a look at each of these in subsequent posts, and we will be linking to the new Web Accessibility website – a bank of accessibility information, best practices and remedies.
How do we know this?
To analyse accessibility, we use two basic methods:
- We scan a website we want to check the accessibility using a software application called PopeTech. This uses one of the world’s top accessibility scanning tool, WAVE, but in this version, we can scan thousands of pages in a relatively short period of time.
- We then conduct a visual scan, reviewing dozens or sometimes hundreds of pages and recording the most common barriers to accessibility we find.
On reporting back to the website owner we suggest where and how to change things and we point them to resources on each area we have touched upon.
What can you do?
One thing about accessibility is that the Carleton community is dedicated to improving it and learning more about how to achieve that. There are multiple ways to improve.
- As I heard someone say at a conference, “The quickest way to eliminate inaccessible content is to not create it in the first place.”
- Read about how to build with accessibility in mind. You can consult the Web Accessibility website for information on a range of content areas.
- There is also plenty to read around the subject – not just in terms of creating web accessible content. We have a readings section on our resources page.
- Try out a tool! Find info on accessibility scanners on the resources page.
- Request an accessibility report from ITS.
We will soon have five posts about those top five challenges in accessibility for you to check out.