ZDNet Education reports on the struggle American universities and colleges have experienced in reaching for website accessibility. According to a Hannon Hill study, only 17 of 124 tested American institutions of higher education were in compliance with the WCAG.
This is sad. Having worked at a couple of colleges, I know that concern with accessibility was nowhere near the level it needed to be: a lot of lip service, little action. If there is any single category of websites which has a critical need for accessibility, it’s education. Yet these institutions are definitely lagging behind.
Why?
Well, once again hearkening back to my own experience at small colleges, the problem is complex. It comes down to a couple of principle problems: governance and knowledge.
Colleges and universities have immense, complex websites. These sites are frequently maintained by any number of different people: faculty, administrative staff, departmental staff, or web management teams. It’s rare for everything in a site to be managed in any truly central manner. Why would they? Every department wants control. Enforcing compliance to the esoteric rules of website accessibility is a monumental task. The governance of a college website is no less complicated then that of a major corporation: but the college environment rarely lends itself to the kind of strict business organization or chains of command present in some corporations.
Even if the college has a dedicated webmaster or web team, these groups (or individuals, in the case of both colleges I’ve worked at) are swamped with new projects, maintenance, and updating. Where’s the time to learn accessibility? The number of web professionals who are aware of and experienced with accessibility is still quite small.
Colleges commonly respond to pressures from their student body, alumni organizations, and donors. When these groups band together to press for change, educational institutions react. So what’s the best way to build momentum and attempt to persuade these colleges? Write them a letter. Write your alma mater; write a letter to the editor in your alumni magazine. Do whatever you can to make the institution know that you care.
It’s highly unlikely that the institution doesn’t think accessibility is important; but the people who are distributing funds may not have realized that their website needs to be addressed.
[…] I was invited a couple weeks ago to redesign and contribute to Accessibility Blog, Matt Bailey’s blog on accessibility awareness and marketing. Today, I posted a brief article addressing the accessibility of college and university websites. […]
Pingback by Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design | New post at Accessibility Blog — October 9, 2006 @ 2:07 pm
My other company does business with probably 50% of the universities in the US and I’d have to say you’re observations are right on the money. Frankly I’m surprised even though it amazes me how far behind the tech times they are. Not just as it concerns web accessibility but on all web practices in general. But there’s probably a good reason for it: Many universities were some of the first to embrace the web, back when tables and font tags were king and they published copious amounts of content. Now, though, to get with it they have the deal with all of that content and are effectively stuck. The sheer volume of work it would entail to make such a transition is more than likely extremely daunting and probably what’s holding them back.
Comment by Mike Cherim — October 9, 2006 @ 8:36 pm
That’s a great point - the sheer quantity of content produced very early on is a massive problem. Add to that a problem which I distinctly remember - the transient nature of college website maintainers - and you can just imagine how difficult a job this must be.
I definitely remember an era where many departments and faculty depended on students to build and maintain their websites: those students graduated, moved on…the websites have stayed. Unedited and inaccessible. (In both the “disabled can’t read it” and the “gosh, I just don’t know how to get into those pages to change them” manners…)
Comment by Joe Dolson — October 9, 2006 @ 8:45 pm
I am sorry but I think you are exagerating the real problem even though I do agree with you that higher education web sites are messy at best. My real issue with what you are saying is that *compliance* with WCAG makes your site accessibile. I believe you have a site that is *accessible* but not following 100% of WCAG (which priority were they measuring against anyway?) recommendations.
Colleges respond to complaints from people who can’t access their content. If people aren’t complaining, and no I am not saying ‘this sucks’ is a valid complaint, about specific issues in a constructive manner there is little for the web folks to do.
I can certainly say with some confidence that University Web Developers list (has more than 14 people on it) is full of higher education web folks who care about accessibility and are actively doing something.
http://www.usask.ca/web_project/uwebd/index.html
To back to the organizational mess that his academia… the real issue is that no one wants to take responsibility for the web or making decisions about it. Why? Staff, Faculty, Students, Alumni, etc all claim ownership and generally are not as enlightened about accessibility issues as the web folks are. Their complaints are generally about color, images, etc. All I am saying is that you being a little hard on the web folks and their skill set.
Now I have lost the rest of the text in my comment so please excuse typos. Without a preview anywhere I can’t proof read (curse blogs and their poor usability) and all I can see are 5 lines of my submission.
Comment by Jesse Rodgers — October 13, 2006 @ 8:54 am
Thanks for your comments, Jesse - actually, the only reason I’m specifically citing compliance with WCAG is because that is the baseline that the Hannon Hill study used to rate college websites. And, although I don’t in fact agree 100% with WCAG’s ratings, some level of compliance is certainly necessary in order to provide a reasonably accessible site.
I wish I knew exactly what priority level the study was measuring; I searched around the site and couldn’t find a specific document which contained the study’s findings.
There are certainly many web developers who know something about web standards and accessibility: but there are even MORE colleges with webmasters who don’t.
Your comments about the lack of a comment preview are much appreciated: I’ve installed a plugin which provides a decent JavaScript live preview. Won’t work for non-js user agents, but the enhancement will at least help some users.
Thanks!
Joe
Comment by Joe Dolson — October 16, 2006 @ 12:25 am