Accessibility Belongs in Your Enrollment Growth Strategy

Does this sound like you? You have been tweaking your ads a lot over the last couple of years. Quality traffic is down, you feel like more bots than humans are clicking, and your ad spend is way up. You’re trying other enrollment growth strategies for higher education, too, but nothing feels quite like it’s clicking.

You’re spending a lot of time, money, and effort to drive prospective students to landing pages, virtual events, and social media feeds. What if I told you about 20% of them hitting a dead end because of digital barriers?

What’s causing those issues? For one, 21% of undergraduate students report having a disability. Different disabilities affect how people navigate and use the internet. If your website is difficult for them to use, they’re just going to leave.

But more than that, Gen Z is not as tech-savvy as people think. While they were raised with technology and are especially great with their phones, studies show that Gen Z knows less about computers than previous generations. (Side note to defend my Gen Z students: they literally stopped teaching computer classes in school. Many of my students say they didn’t get more than a couple of classes.) That means they feel like things should be easy, but don’t necessarily want to or know how to troubleshoot when things go wrong.

The short version: your website has to be easy to use with little to no friction. The best way to guarantee that is to make it accessible.

It’s time to make digital accessibility a key part of your enrollment marketing. In this article, we’re going to break down how it helps expand your social media reach, increase conversions, improve discoverability, and protect your university’s reputation.

You are not dealing with traditional marketing when you work in higher education. Sure, you’re selling a service (your university’s degree program), but this isn’t something people think about for a few minutes.

The higher-ed sales cycle is unique because it’s not truly done until they’ve walked across the graduation stage. Even then, you move them into a new bucket and sell to them as alumni who may help or donate to the university.

This is one reason many of the same marketing strategies you see people talk about across different groups, online forums, subreddits, and even conferences just won’t work the same for you. Yes, you can write blogs, run ads, post on social media, and hold events. You won’t convert a student in a few interactions. Most pay attention to your marketing for a while before they enroll, during college, and after graduation.

Whatever marketing strategies you choose that fit your students best can’t have any friction. This matters especially for high school students choosing their home for the next four years, as well as grad students, returning students, and even community members who might donate. Their decision has to be easy.

If your website, social media, or digital assets are difficult for them to use at any point, you can lose them. This is especially true if you are telling students you have an inclusive, welcoming campus community but your website isn’t accessible. Can they trust you?

Making your content accessible wherever you publish it is your best marketing strategy. You’ll stop losing qualified students from your funnel and start reaching more of your perfect students, too.

As you’ve researched the new ADA Title II Part H rule, you’ve been thinking mostly about your website. Did you know you also need to ensure your social media follows WCAG standards?

Yes, you don’t have much control over what third-party platforms allow you to do. However, most have updated in the last few years to make accessible content easier. You can do a lot right in the platform without relying on third-party tools.

Let’s look at a few ways to make our social media content more accessible.

Yes, closed captions or subtitles help potential students who are deaf or hard of hearing. They also help non-native speakers, neurodivergent students, and everyone who prefers to watch videos in silence. And that number isn’t small. Around 69% of people prefer to watch social media videos without sound in public, and a whopping 25% do so in private settings. Adding subtitles helps you reach everyone better. You’ll also get better video completion rates, since fewer people will scroll away when they can understand it all.

Social media should be available to all, which is why most platforms finally added ALT text descriptions to images. When you upload pictures or even designed graphics with text, use the alternative text description to include people who use screen readers. This helps ensure they don’t miss key announcements or events.

You can also include a description of the image(s) at the bottom of your social media caption. This helps not only those who use assistive tools, but also makes it easy for everyone to see what’s in your post. Sometimes text is smaller than you think on the actual social media feed, or your color combinations do not have a high enough contrast. A key part of accessibility is offering alternative ways to get that information, and image descriptions are a great way to do that with very little work.

Speaking of alternative ways to get information: keep your content understandable to everyone whenever you can.

A great way to do that is to test the color contrast between font and background when you add any graphics with text. You also want to avoid putting text straight on an image. Images have so many color variations that they can make text hard to read.

Avoid emojis and “fancy fonts,” as they don’t render the same on all phones, let alone with assistive tools. (Fun fact: fancy fonts are not actually text. They’re emojis turned into letters.)

And keep your captions short and to the point. No one came on social media to read a novel, especially not college students.

When your content is easy for everyone to understand and “get” within a few seconds, you’ll have better overall reach.

A student can’t convert if they don’t know how to navigate your forms or what to do next. Web accessibility is one of the most important parts of conversion optimization. It reduces the friction many people face when going through a website, helping them get to that next step.

For most universities and higher education institutions, your goal isn’t always the Apply Now button. You want them to attend a campus event, download your guides, or reach out to an admissions counselor. All of these steps have to be super clear, and yes, accessible.

Look at it another way. Having an inaccessible website is like leaving the door to admissions closed to 1 in 5 potential students. Don’t want that? Let’s take a look at how accessibility helps your website convert.

Not all students are sitting at a desk, on a laptop, in a perfect setting while looking at your website. Often they’re on their phones on the bus, at practice, or just sitting outside with friends while doing some research. Can they see everything and navigate no matter where they are?

We use high enough color contrast to help people with color blindness read our content. It also helps students outdoors read everything, even in bright sunlight.

Clear visual hierarchy – with proper heading usage, bullets, and bolded sentences – helps those with dyslexia and cognitive issues move through your content. They also make it easy to skim your website, even on a mobile device, to find the information they need.

Studies show that Gen Z prefer touchscreens over a traditional keyboard. Because their typing and keyboard skills lag behind other generations, your website needs to be easy to navigate on touchscreen devices.

Many of the improvements you make for WCAG standards and assistive devices also improve your mobile-friendliness. Larger touch targets, clear focus states, pausable animations, and clear form error messages help students who may not be able to see the full screen.

Ah, website design trends. They often come and go, but some bad ones circle back. Right now, animations and bloated designs are back in style after a few years. Why is this bad? Pages filled with too many options kill conversions. Not only can they confuse users with ADHD, but they make it hard for anyone to focus on what you want them to do next.

Keep the choices to a minimum and focus on what you want them to do when they read that page.

How do you help people learn your website in just a few seconds? You use consistent visuals throughout. Keep buttons and links the same color. Your navigation is in the same spot. Heading sizes are consistent. Fonts are clean and easy to read. Calls to action are super clear.

Your website design sets clear expectations for readers. Keeping design elements consistent throughout helps everyone understand where they can go and what you want them to do. This reduced friction helps everyone, not just those who rely on accessible design.

Search engines and AI tools love accessible websites as much as prospective students do. Google’s bots crawl your website just like a blind student using a screen reader. Most WCAG rules match technical SEO best practices. Follow one, and you’re helping the other.

For instance:

• ALT Text: Google uses your alternative text description and file name to understand what’s in the image. With a good description, you can rank higher not only in image search, but traditional search results pages, too.
• Proper Heading Structure: Using headings correctly helps your students skim pages more easily, which Google loves. They also make it easier for Google to understand the full context of your page, so it can serve the right pages to the right audience and search queries.
• Consistent Visual Design: Clear, consistent design helps people stay and do more on your website. When students stay longer, take action, or click through to other pages, Google sees that your website has value. This increased engagement rate helps show search engines that you do have the answers people are looking for.
• Descriptive Link Text: What we link needs to be clear so screen readers jumping from link to link know what they’re clicking on. This also helps Google’s crawler understand the context of the page they are navigating to.

When our website is built to be accessible to everyone, it will be easier for everyone to find. AI bots look at websites similarly to Google and other search engines, so whatever we do to improve our SEO helps our GEO (generative engine optimization), too.

Attending a university isn’t just about the degree. Students are choosing where they’ll live for the next few years, the community they will be relying on as they step into adulthood. They’re also deciding on a network of alumni they’ll be attached to for the rest of their lives. Does your university’s brand match what you say?

Your digital content’s accessibility says a lot about whether or not students can trust you.

Gen Z views brands differently than most generations. Perhaps because social media made these answers all too easy to find, a recent YouGov poll shows Gen Z values trustworthiness, honesty, and consistency very important in brands.

Does your marketing message match up with what’s true? It doesn’t if you claim to be an inclusive community, but all of your resources are inaccessible PDFs. Or you don’t include subtitles on videos. Or half the colors on your website are unreadable.

It’s not just that you’ll lose the students with disabilities either. They share their experiences with friends, family, and all of social media when they run into big issues that go against stated values.

Not only does an accessible website protect you against private litigation those students can bring, but it will protect you from the negative PR and social brigading, too.

You cannot afford to ignore web accessibility. It needs to be a major part of your enrollment growth strategies for higher education.

Not quite sure where to start? Understanding that accessibility matters and may be a problem for you is step one, so great job on getting to the end of this article! The next step is taking action to ensure the content you create across the internet is accessible to everyone.

This is not an IT checklist item, either. Your entire marketing team should help with this because, when done correctly, it can net you a 100:1 ROI.

Do you know you want to build accessible marketing campaigns but aren’t sure where to start? You need a process your whole team can use.

Make accessibility easy with the Creating Accessible Content course. This practical, straightforward course not only gives you the exact checklist you need, but it also walks you through exactly how to take those steps and why.

Inside you’ll learn how to write great ALT text, test your color contrast, choose the right heading sizes, and so much more.

Want to be one of the first to get access? Join the waitlist now. You’ll learn how to remove friction throughout your entire marketing funnel while also meeting WCAG rules.

Let’s turn more prospects into applicants.