As we often tell people, Carleton has a web community that is totally committed to accessibility. When we attend webinars and conferences online on the subject, we often hear that in other web communities across North America people have to be persuaded to integrate accessibility into the content they create. At Carleton what we experience is you – the university’s content creators – coming to us and asking, “Okay, how can we integrate accessibility in an even better way?” In a lot of other places it is “Why must we include accessibility?”; at Carleton it is, “How do we do an even better job of integrating it?”
So give yourselves a pat on the back! But don’t rest on your laurels! (Is it actually physically possible to pat yourself on the back and rest on your laurels at the same time?) There is always more you can do.
To help improve your sites, we offer an accessibility scanning service. We do this in two ways: we run the website through our scanning application, and we visit a number of pages on your site to physically check items that the software scan cannot.
The software we use to scan sites is called PopeTech. You can read more about PopeTech here. It uses the WAVE application from Accessibility in Mind to examine multiple pages at a time. If you ever want to scan a single page yourself to check its accessibility, you can do that using the WAVE website.
When we create a report for you we will highlight any accessibility errors in the content. We will also mention errors in the template – these are for us to fix. Please do not worry about subjecting your site to a scan – most sites are in a really great place, and if there are errors, we will provide examples of the issue, explain why it is a challenge to accessibility and how to remedy it.
You can request the accessibility scan by completing this form.