Accessibility is of the utmost importance to Carleton University.
Carleton’s commitment to accessibility is guided by the principles of dignity, independence, integration and equal opportunity and apply to students, faculty and staff, contractors and visitors or guests.
What is an accessible website?
Web accessibility refers to a set of guidelines, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), that specify how to make digital content accessible for all users, despite differences in ability. WCAG is organized around four principles:
In cases where you can’t make the website or web content accessible, information it contains must be made available upon request.
How to Create Accessible Web Content
There are roughly 60 success criteria outline in WCAG 2.0 guidelines. About 25% of these are specific to body content that each of our web content administrators have control over. These include things like:
- navigation
- headings
- tables
- text formatting
- hyperlinks
- images
In this section of our website we have outlined 12 key things to do in four categories: text, images, tables, and video. Doing these 12 things will not only ensure your website is accessible, but will also enhance your google ranking (through Search Engine Optimization or SEO) and make your site more usable to all.
In addition, if you upload PDFs to your website, please follow the Creating Accessible Documents guidelines provided by Equity and Inclusive Communities.