A report has been published about college Web sites and their 508 compliance. The results are not good. 100 colleges were randomly selected with the condition that each state be represented by 2 schools.
Here are some highlights:
88% had broken or no “skipnav” links
83% of those page containing form elements had a missing or incorrectly associated form label
71% contained at least one image with a missing or inappropriate alt attribute
This is truly not good! One, these elements are the best known accessibility fixes. If these were ignored, I just assume the subtler elements were never even considered. Two, the 508 standards have been around for seven years! What does it say if we cannot adopt a set of accessibility standards in seven years.
What does this mean to a DS coordinator?
I maintain that the DS office cannot get involved with campus Web accessibility at the coding or programming level, but DS is a stakeholder in this issue and must actively promote and support the accessibility of their school Web sites.
A DS coordinator must get some sense of the general accessibility of the school’s Web site and go from there. Many schools are adopting style guidelines for their pages and that is an excellent opportunity to have accessibility policies included.
This is extremely important to students with disabilities. Colleges are transmitting so much important student information over the Web that to ignore this invites trouble.
It was conducted by GOALS which is a project of
3 comments:
This type of blog is a great idea. Most AT info is along the technical lines, and not much on the management and implementation. It's a challenge getting the information out to faculty and staff about what AT we have on campus and what it can do.
I'm curious, were the randomly chosen schools notified of your results? If so, what was their response?
Hi Anonymous,
I didn't do the research. Direct your question to GOALS at http://www.ncdae.org/goals/ .
James
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