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Accessibility

Accessibility is one of many keys to providing a better user experience on your website. The basic purpose of accessibility guidelines is to help guide web creators toward practices that can make their sites easier to use for everyone, whether they are people with disabilities or not.

Accessibility means making web content available for as many users as possible. Visitors who should be taken into account when thinking about accessibility on the web are often not just visitors with impairments, but users with slow connectivity or small screens, users who speak English as their second language (ESL), or users who are new/inexperienced with technologies. At VCU, diversity and inclusion are the norm, and users who require additional accommodations to browse VCU’s online resources shouldn’t be an afterthought or exception.

Federal checklist

Accessibility

  • Pages must include skip to content links
  • Title tags need to be unique for each page
  • Form inputs need to have associated labels
  • The entire site needs be navigable with only the keyboard
  • Non-trivial images must include alt text
  • Links need to have meaningful text and tell users where they are being pointed to
  • For all PDFs, users must be able to highlight text in a logical order and copy it to another program
  • Videos have to be captioned
  • Pages must set an appropriate language
  • Suitable color contrast ratios between text and background

VCU specific checklist

Accessibility

  • The website passes the WCAG 2.0 Level AA accessibility standard
  • The website contains zero HTML validation errors
  • The website contains a link to a “text only” version of the website
  • After the opening body tag a div with the id of “skip-links” must be included and enclose a series of skip links. You are encouraged to include skip links to major pieces of your website template, but the skips links must include at least one to the main content section.
  • The website should also be readable with stylesheets turned off.

Providing accommodation

In general, the costs associated with providing accessibility and reasonable accommodation for employees and visitors comes from the regular operating budget for a given university program or activity. Departments should consider that accommodations will be needed from time to time and should plan accordingly in their budget process.

Text alternatives

An alternative "text-only" or transcript page should be made available for people who may not be able to view the graphics or hear the audio. Technology Services provides a script that will dynamically convert any VCU webpage to a text only version. Once in the text-only version users can surf around to any VCU page in text only mode. A text site is a supplement, not a replacement for an accessible website.

To enable the text only version on your page, insert the following link into the footer signature of your page.

<a href="http://text.vcu.edu:8080/tt/referrer">View text versiona>

How to check accessibility

There are many different audiences who require different accommodations based on their disabilities and needs. The four main categories of which people with disabilities fall under are visual, auditory, motor, and conceptual. Due to this variety of disabilities, websites need to be made accessible to all audiences in the same manner as it is accessible to people without disabilities. While automated tools can often help identify issues, creating and maintaining an accessible website ultimately requires human judgment, reasoning and action. When possible it is good practice to do in person testing of your website with a variety of users to make sure the website able to be navigated and the content consumed.

Continuous reporting with SiteImprove

Technology Services has partnered with SiteImprove to provide web governance software to VCU's organizational websites. The software can be used identify accessibility errors, broken links, spelling mistakes, readability scores for content and other helpful insights to make your web pages friendly for VCU's web visitors. Account users have the ability to login to a dashboard or view statistics sent in a periodic email. To get an account with for VCU's SiteImprove please submit a Service Desk ticket at go.vcu.edu/webhelp with what VCU websites you need to begin getting reports for.

Scan your individual pages

Technology Services provides the AChecker tool to scan your pages for accessibility compliance issues and HTML validation. The AChecker tool defaults to check your pages against the WCAG 2.0 (Level AA) requirements.

If you need to scan a page that is behind a login or some type of firewall you can use the "HTML File Upload" or "Paste HTML Markup" options of the checker. To get the source code of the page, right click on the page and navigate to "View page source" (or the equivalent for your browser). 

Checking the accessibility of PDFs

Content creators making accessible PDF files should follow similar guidelines as HTML web pages in regards to using appropriate document structure and markup. At a minimum, users should be able to highlight the text of the PDF in a logical order and copy the text content out of the PDF and into another program. SiteImprove's continuous reporting will also check for PDF accessibility and provide tips on how to repair issues. Additionally, Adobe's Acrobat Pro software has accessibility tools built in to remediate issues during the initial creation.

VCU Policies

Helpful tools & resources

Below are some helpful tools and resources to help you learn more about accessibility and test your websites to make sure they are as accessible as possible.