— The challenge
Good design is accessible design, period. And yet, after years of tangled and organic growth of over four hundred websites (not to mention individuals' sites for clubs and professors), it found itself far below industry and acceptable ratings. Its issues? Tens of thousands of broken links, broken images, text in images, and wrong tabbing order.
As a web developer, my primary role is contributing code and design edits to our Drupal 7 distribution, with a team of about 7 other developers.
— The goals of this project
- Improving accessibility of high-traffic UNT websites
- Streamlined strategy for improving accessibility on all 400+ UNT websites
- Improve quality of content and SEO
- Educate UNT community about web accessibility, particularly community members who edit UNT websites
— The solutions
- Contributing code to our standard University theme and Drupal distribution to improve style issues such as low color contrast
- Improving tabbing order using aria labels and semantic HTML
- Using Siteimprove to identify accessibility issues, set goals, and track progress
- Training content creators in common accessibility standards
Accessibility means usable by everyone.
The ongoing implementation of accessibility changes to UNT websites has drastically improved not just the look of the University's websites, but the quality of content.
My philosophy with approaching this project is that accessibility is for everyone. Stephanie Stimac's article titled Location, Privilege and Performant Websites details how we all find ourselves needing fast-loading, informative websites. Accessibility also speaks to a spectrum of peoples' needs - for instance, vision is often low color perception, or blindness.
Left: photo of the UNT Luminarium installation that reads, "Accessibility means usable by everyone."
Collaboration among our campus developers on coding and policy-making yielded very positive results across our sites.
Our Siteimprove audit system uses several different metrics for measuring the quality of our sites. Accessibility refers to how well we meet WCAG AA and AAA standards for navigability and design, and Quality Assurance refers to the quality of our content - for instance, broken links and misspellings.
These websites return zero accessibility errors using browser tools; however, there's always room for improvement.
Below are projects I led for improving accessibility.