The Students Web Accessibility Helps

You constantly strive to create compelling online experiences that attract and engage prospective students. You’ve worked hard with your team to create social media content, paid ads, landing pages, and changes to your website to get maximum conversions. But are you considering all your potential students? 

To reach everyone in your target audience and stop losing out on crucial conversions, you need to embrace web accessibility across your content.

I totally understand that web accessibility is an investment (one that does offer a 100:1 ROI), and that means you’ll need to justify any new expenses for your budget.

What’s one of the best ways to do that? By showing which students you’re helping when you create accessible content.

It’s much easier to embrace initial upfront costs when you can see exactly who you’re helping.

Let’s look at some students who directly benefit from an accessible website and how these improvements create a better overall experience.

This one seems obvious, but you have students with various levels of visual impairment on your campus right now. Whether they’re legally blind, have poor eyesight, or are color blind, they navigate the internet differently. These students need to be able to navigate to your website’s different areas without asking their roommates for help.

Individuals who are legally blind often use assistive technology, such as screen readers, to read a web page back to them. They’ll use keyboard navigation to get around your website and the screen reader will read your content and alternative text for the images on your pages.

Using the correct page and heading structure allows a screen reader to understand your site and helps your student navigate it with their keyboard.

Linking explanatory text instead of the words “click here” or “learn more” allows these students to understand what they’ll get when they follow that link, as many of them jump from link to link instead of reading the entire page.

While some can correct their vision with contacts and glasses, not everyone can. Students who use corrective lenses and still have vision issues might be low-sighted. For them, screens and text can be hard to read and distinguish.

To help, we want to ensure that our website looks good even if users use assistive technology to increase their overall font size. We do this by following responsive design best practices and avoiding using set font sizes. For instance, instead of setting a headline to 30 pixels in the CSS, we might set that to 2em.

This is a bit more technical and, depending on your website technology, may require a discussion with your web development team, but it’s an integral part of the process to ensure it works for everyone.

All those fun graphics you create for social media? New pages you create for your website? You need to make sure that you’re checking the color ratio.

When we use a font color on top of a background that does not have a high enough contrast, the text can be indistinguishable to someone with color blindness. That’s why you often see black text on white backgrounds—it’s the gold standard for readability.

You can test your brand colors using WebAim’s Contrast Checker. I find it incredibly helpful to create a simple chart to know what combinations will work when making graphics or pages.

We also want to avoid using color only to communicate important information. Instead of a link changing colors on hover, you might add an underline or an alternative animation to make it super clear.

Using the correct page structure and ALT descriptions improves your overall search engine optimization. Those ALT descriptions also show to anyone with a slow internet connection or who prefers to browse the internet with images turned off, so they’ll still get the context. Prioritizing good keyboard navigation and resizable text helps everyone have better control over your website. And following color contrast standards ensures that your content is more legible for everyone (I’m not color blind, but no, I can’t read your yellow text on a pink background).

In the interest of transparency, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD. And suddenly, so much of my life made sense, but one thing was obvious – no wonder I struggled to understand certain websites.

As you probably know, ADHD can often mean students get distracted or have trouble focusing. I joke to people that it’s like having 20+ tabs open in your brain at all times (which is lower than the actual number of browser tabs I have open at all times). Cluttered websites with excessive animations, flashing content, or long blocks of text can be overwhelming and make it difficult for students like me to focus and process the information you want them to understand.

If you want your ADHD students to understand your website, ditch the overly complex design and focus on simplicity.

Use a clean layout with ample white space (negative space around design elements) to help guide the eye around the page. Your navigation should also be simple so users cannot second-guess what they’re clicking on. 

An essential part? Make your website easy for your students to skim and find what they need. We want to use descriptive link text like we do for visually impaired students. We also keep paragraphs short and use bolded sections and bulleted lists to allow them to get as much information as quickly as possible.

When we make a website easy to understand, we’re helping everyone who might visit it. No one wants to think too hard as they browse the internet, not even when looking at different colleges and universities for their education. They want to find the answers to their questions quickly and easily, and by ensuring your site is understandable for students with ADHD, it’s a whole lot easier for everyone else.

Students might have reading difficulties for many reasons, but the most common is dyslexia. As an instructor, I think I’ve averaged at least one dyslexic student per term, so this isn’t an uncommon issue.

While many dyslexic students may need more time to read your content, large blocks of text, a lack of visual breaks, and even specific fonts can make it difficult to understand.

Just about everything we do to make a website easier for students with ADHD applies to those same students with dyslexia. (Isn’t that nice?)

But we want to take a couple of extra steps. First, we want to eliminate technical jargon and aim for a secondary reading level. Using simple phrasing makes it far easier to skim and understand content quickly.

Second, we need to consider the font styles we choose. We want to offer adjustable font sizes and styles and use readable fonts. Often, accessibility experts prefer sans-serif fonts because the letters don’t run into each other, but many fonts will work, especially if you can adjust the spacing.

Just like for those visually-impaired students, you provide options for adjustable font sizes, it can help individuals who might need that flexibility. Breaking up your content to be skimmable improves readability for everyone, especially those using smaller screens or just looking for the necessary information.

But there’s another big thing to consider—the average literacy level in the US is not as high as you think. According to recent research, 54% of US adults read below a sixth-grade level. Creating content for this vast portion of our potential audience means making our content available to everyone.

All that video content you’ve been investing in might be excluding students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Without providing alternatives, they’ll miss out on the context of that content. This may affect those born with hearing loss and those who have worked in environments where hearing loss is a side-effect of the job (think veterans with tinnitus).

This one is pretty simple: Any video or audio content you produce needs a text-based alternative. That could be captions in the videos or a transcript they can download. You should provide transcripts for audio narration, whether for a longer video or a podcast episode.

Thankfully, most video and audio platforms are making it easier to provide captions, so you can often use automated, built-in captioning depending on your video. You can also get captions and transcripts generated through services like Rev. Just be mindful that you’ll want to double-check for accuracy with any automated captioning tools you use.

Let’s be real – a staggering number of people are watching videos with the sound off and relying on captions. Whether because they’re browsing in public or just prefer to read, they want to use the captions to understand a video. A ton of people also like to use both the captions and the sound, so providing those alternative options ensures you’re making it easy for everyone to get the most out of the videos you’re producing. 

Of course, when you provide a transcript for longer videos or podcast episodes, you can use that content to improve your SEO and make it more discoverable.

Perhaps one of the most drastic consequences of an inaccessible website is the possibility of triggering seizures in students with epilepsy. Those fast video transitions, flashing or flickering animations, can create a safety risk for your students. Unfortunately for those students, we don’t load messages that there are flashing lights on a website, so they can avoid it like they can certain movies or physical environments.

For the safety of our students, we need to keep animations on our website to a minimum. WCAG recommends no more than three flashes per second, including on your website and in your videos.

Any animations you use on your website must be done quickly (within a second) or be pauseable.

A typical example is the use of slides. While slides on a webpage help us deliver content in an engaging way, constantly rotating them can cause physical reactions. Instead, slides should only rotate when a user hits the next arrow, and we want to make sure those arrows are super obvious so it’s easy to see that there’s more content.

Constant animations might look cool, but often they’re nothing more than a distraction to everyone. Instead, using slight animations can help guide the eye to the content you want without creating a distraction. 

And let’s be clear—excess animations can feel tacky and overdone, so keeping it simple helps maintain a professional aesthetic.

An often common misconception, even with other web designers, is that following WCAG standards makes the website hard for non-disabled users.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

International students benefit from transcripts and alternative formats, students with temporary disabilities can navigate using a keyboard, and every student can find what they need quickly. When we follow web accessibility best practices, we ensure that the website is easier for everyone to use. 

With an accessible website, you’re:

• Expanding your reach to a broader talent pool of prospective students
• Demonstrating your commitment to inclusivity and your values
• Improving the experience for everyone
• Improving your on-page SEO
• And mitigating the legal risks of an inaccessible website

With an accessible website, you’re creating a better, more inclusive, and more effective website for everyone.