Importance of Accessibility
Carleton University continually strives to make all its spaces – digital as well as physical – as accessible as possible. Accessibility is an issue of social justice and we are working hard to improve this with input from our community.
Besides it being an issue of equity, there are other reasons to improve our standards with accessibility. These include:
- recruitment: universities with websites that are accessible attract more students,
- representation: 27% of Canadians identify as having a disability, while many others have limitations they don’t associate with a disability but which would be impacted by poor accessibility.
- usability: all features that make a web page accessible make it easier to use for everybody
- findability: plus those same feature improve its search engine optimization.
A properly nested hierarchy of sub-headings within the page, and clear, succinct paragraphs of text mean a page will perform better in search engine results, be easier to navigate for users with screen readers, and flags visual cues to those not using screen readers.
Those without disabilities can benefit from accessible design in different situations. For instance, we can employ captions when watching a video when in noisy or quiet spaces.
Therefore, when we improve the accessibility Carleton’s websites, we improve those sites for everyone.