Web Accessibility Policies at Land-Grant Universities.

“Arguably, Section 508 could be interpreted as applying at the level of individual faculty Web sites that are created and utilized to support classroom instruction. Thus, university faculty could be held responsible for complying with the legal mandates of Web accessibility law for the Web sites they create and maintain for instructional purposes. However, this is potentially problematic as many faculty may not have the Web design skills necessary to build an accessible Web site (Bradbard & Peters, 2010). Research shows that as faculty are placing an increasing amount of course-related material on the Web, they are simultaneously expressing concern about the lack of free time and institutional support necessary to stay abreast of new technology (Lincoln, 2001, Osika et al., 2009, Smart et al., 2003)”

There are now web accessible templates for self-published websites and built-in LMS accessibility features that weren’t available at the time of this publication. However, faculty and students may not have the accessibility literacy skills to know how to use the features to make their site or content accessible. They may not know they need to adjust their workflow. How often / how well are accessibility  practices included in educator and student training for their workflow technology?

Data from the U. S. Census Bureau (2005) indicate that approximately 40 million Americans have at least one form of disability. Furthermore, of the total number of disabled Americans, approximately 40% use computers and access the Internet (Wellner, 2000). Although only a portion of disabled people attend postsecondary institutions, disabled students may be more likely to use computers and access the Web, when compared to the larger disabled population….recent estimates (2003–2004) for the size of the population of postsecondary students with disabilities put the total number of undergraduate students at 2,156,000 out of a total population 19,054,000, and the number of graduate students at 189,000 out of a population of 2,156,000 (U.S. Department of Education National Center for Education Statistics, 2008, Table 215). Thus, disabled students represent approximately 11 and 7% of the total undergraduate and graduate student populations, respectively.

This doesn’t say how the population of students with disabilities attending universities was identified. We know there is a significant difference between the % that apply for academic services and the % who self-identify as disabled, for example. Universities tend to count learners by the number who qualify as disabled according to their program guidelines for academic supports. By some reports, number has stayed roughly consistent. Though other reporting now indicates more like 20% of the student body experiences disabilities.

…university Web accessibility policies must be designed appropriately so they actually get utilized by faculty, departments and colleges. This is important as Rowland (2000) states that most of the existing university Web accessibility policies are not effective.

UVic’s accessibility statement for educators to add to syllabi used to say (2020ish) “the university community share the responsibility to promote equality, remove barriers, and create a respectful and inclusive learning environment.” It has since been changed to “The University of Victoria is committed to creating a learning experience that is as accessible as possible. If you are registered with the Centre for Accessible Learning and anticipate or experience any barriers to learning in this course, please feel welcome to discuss your concerns with me. If you are a student with a disability or chronic health condition, you can meet with a CAL advisor to discuss access and accommodations.” Neither required any reference to web accessibility. The new one is seems to limit accessibility to those registered with CAL and sadly steps away from the notion that accessibility is a community responsibility.

…university Web accessibility policies must be designed appropriately so they actually get utilized by faculty, departments and colleges. This is important as Rowland (2000) states that most of the existing university Web accessibility policies are not effective…The lack of training could perpetuate Web design with aesthetics, rather than equal access, as the goal.

Two universities with very good policies are Purdue University and the University of California

Except there’s a difference between good policies and good implementation of a policy – for example University of California is now famous for choosing to remove over twenty thousand free video lectures following a Department of Justice complaint that the videos weren’t fully accessible (Ernst 2017). Instead of captioning them or offering transcripts, U of C removed them entirely. “The tragedy of this incidence is that students with disabilities are both blamed for the removal and among the students most in need of affordable access to content. (Treviranus, Richards and Clark, Inclusively Designed Authoring Tools, 2019).”

If the policy does not explicitly state that pages designed by faculty for instructional purposes must be compliant with the university policy, faculty may assume that they do not have to abide by the university policy.

This assumes faculty have wondered about the policy’s applicability to them and may have consciously decided they are exempt. I suspect most faculty aren’t even aware of the policy’s existence and don’t know enough about web accessibility to think to ask for the institution’s policy on it. I don’t think we have any baseline statistics for: awareness of web/digital accessibility; and awareness of institutional web accessibility policy; before we even get to educator responsibility within the policy. Baseline would be higher in US because of legislation and culture of litigation than in Canada, at present.

Many common flaws inhibit Web site accessibility such as missing text tags for images, uncaptioned audio, undescribed video, and misuse of tables (see Carter and Markel, 2001, McCormick, 2006b, Miller, 2006) that are corrected with a modest amount of training. Universities could easily improve the accessibility of their Web sites if they provided training to address a shortlist of design flaws mentioned …

This is a powerful conclusion / recommendation. These common web accessibility errors are published by various sources. Consider running an analysis of common errors; then doing an analysis of digital accessibility training/interventions for educators at post sec institutions to see how/if the errors are addressed in current practice.

If a university is committed to making all of its Web sites accessible, there needs to be a Web accessibility champion selected from the upper echelon of the university’s management structure.

Accessibility champions aren’t new. This idea has been kicking around for at lease 15 years. This paper points out the need for the institutions to identify the role / person / people responsible for web accessibility policy, training and enforcement in the Executive. It’s an interesting question. Does it fall under Administrative Services? Human Rights Office? Academic Provost? It would depend on if the institution sees digital accessibility as a compliance issue, or as a fundamental literacy skill needed for educators and students to participate in accessible learning communities.