Estimated time to complete: 12 minutes
Take Action
Create an accessibility plan
No matter if your site is brand-new or years old, it’s worthwhile to strategize about how you can improve the accessibility of its content. A good way to consider your approach, as well as get everyone on your team on board, is to create a plan. This plan should include:
- How you will educate everyone who will be creating content on how to do so with accessibility in mind (feel free to send them to this training!)
- How you will review any content you already have to ensure that it is accessible (we have a checklist in Module 6 that you may use)
- How you will ensure that new content is created with accessibility in mind
- While educating content creators is an essential part of this, you might want to also consider a process for reviewing new content with accessibility in mind
Your plan should also include timeline goals to complete these tasks. Do not leave accessibility to the last minute.
Further Resources
- The full WCAG web accessibility guidelines can be found here. Here is a shorter summary of the WCAG guidelines.
- A longer overview of AODA website guidelines can be found here.
- Read more about accessibility in our community with Carleton University’s Coordinated Accessibility Strategy.
- We recommend you watch the first 60 seconds of this screen reader demo video to better understand the different ways in which people access web content
- NV Access is an open-source screen-reader software that you can use to access content as well as test for content accessibility. The software is free, but you can also support the project through donation
- This video in the Web Accessibility Matters series gives a great summary of how building websites with accessibility in mind benefits everybody.
- WebAIM (Web Accessibility In Mind) is an all-around great resource for understanding and implementing web accessibility.
- An article by WebAIM that related to our module is Constructing a POUR Website which gives information on fulfilling the WCAG guidelines.
- W3’s Web Accessibility Initiative provides a thorough introduction to accessibility