Web Accessibility is Your Best Student Recruitment Strategy

Did you just breathe a sigh of relief when the new Title II Part H rule of the ADA got pushed back? Have I got bad news for you. Do you have more time to bring your website up to WCAG standards, according to the US government? Sure. But not being accessible is costing you students and enrollment.

I totally understand that a lot of institutions felt overwhelmed by the regulations (even though you had 2 years to improve accessibility). However, I bet you’re also feeling a bit of a squeeze to keep your enrollment numbers up. These two things are not unrelated.

Web accessibility is a recruitment tool that you are actively ignoring. 63% of adult learners say they will leave a school website that isn’t user-friendly, which web accessibility ensures. If you’re waiting for legal requirements to kick in, you’re already losing students to competitors who have been doing it right for years.

Stop letting your marketing funnels leak great students. Let’s talk about how web accessibility is a competitive advantage in higher education.

Have you been hearing this lately – “Marketing is dead” or “Marketing as we know it is changing forever?”

I keep hearing both of those things in the context of AI, but the reality is that it’s been changing since Facebook launched.

Social media has changed how we view the world and made it easier to understand the nuances and “secrets” behind a brand. I work with Gen Z every day in the classroom, and I can tell you – they rely heavily on social media for most of their understanding of the world.

Perhaps that’s why a brand’s ethics and values matter so much to Gen Z. A recent YouGov poll found that 65% of Gen Z like it when a company has a moral message, and 52% like it when brands get involved with social issues. Even more important? 37% only buy from brands whose values align with their own.

As a higher education institution, you are held to higher standards than regular brands. Students are spending tens of thousands of dollars to earn their degree from your university, laying the foundation for their entire career and livelihood.

But if you are actively excluding the 27% of potential students who have a disability, they tell their friends. If you get sued for lack of accessibility, they see that in their research. It is difficult to convince students that they belong at your university when you are effectively shadow-banning their peers.

If you tout an inclusive university experience, your website has to live up to that, too.

I asked my Digital Marketing students about their experiences researching colleges, especially with websites. They all mentioned that what saved a poor website experience in their college hunt was either geographic proximity, friends going to the same school, or recruiters showing up at events. But you can’t reach every excellent student that way.

Gen Z was born after the internet and raised in a wholly different environment. While most Millennials and Gen X I know joke about our analog youth and learning the internet with the rest of the world, Gen Z was born into it. (Cue Bane: “I was born in it, molded by it.”) Their patience for digital friction is basically 0.

While sadly a lot of my disabled and visually-impaired friends have some patience for poor website experiences (it’s their everyday reality), they still are not calling IT. If they cannot navigate your website without support, what will their on-campus experience look like?

Web accessibility standards align with user experience best practices, too. An accessible website is easy for everyone to use. Without? Well, let’s just say that if your website is difficult to use, they leave and never come back.

I get that this can all sound scary and make you wonder what you’re missing out on. Want to hear some great news? Web accessibility guidelines and SEO best practices align, just like they do with user experience.

Google and WCAG guidelines basically have the same goal: a clear, organized, and fast user experience.

You may not know, but Google experiences the internet much like screen reader users do. Their bots have to traverse the internet, without a human “seeing” what’s on the page. When we write accessible code and follow basic best practices, we help Google better understand our website. This, in turn, can improve our overall search engine rankings and help us have great visibility.

Here’s how a few accessibility improvements help Google:

• ALT Text – Helps Google understand images and improves image search performance
• Semantic HTML: Helps Google understand the structure of your content
• Proper Header Usage (H1-H6): Tells Google exactly what your page is about
• Simpler Language: Improves engagement rate and better keyword match

By fixing accessibility issues, you are performing a high-level SEO audit that helps you outrank rival institutions in search results.

Whether you love or hate AI, students are probably using it to replace traditional search. While this may have shifted in the last 12 months, as of April 2025, 34% of Gen Z use AI chatbots for search. Google still may be in the lead, but its AI overviews have changed SERPs, too.

How do you ensure your website still gets seen? You follow web accessibility best practices.

No shock here, but AI bots work much like Google’s. They’re trained to look at websites with that same structure; they just provide their answers differently.

If showing up in AI search matters to your organization, then following web accessibility best practices can only improve your standings.

You can improve a website built with almost anything, but not all website platforms are built equally.

If achieving 100% accessibility is important to you while still maintaining a user-friendly CMS, WordPress may be your best option. Originally created as a blogging platform, WordPress has some of the best built-in web accessibility features because, once again, they align with SEO best practices.

One HUGE caveat. Not all WordPress themes are built equally. For a large organization with a probably large website, I highly recommend custom WordPress websites. However, if that’s not in your budget in the next fiscal year and you just want to improve what you have for now, I get it.

Let’s talk about what we can do.

Especially great if you have a few people managing content on your website, plugins add reminders to follow web accessibility checklists.

Made by NASA’s own web accessibility specialists, Equalize Digital, Accessibility Checker adds alerts for issues like missing ALT text, color contrast, broken links, etc., when you try to save a page. It’s a great way to improve your content before you ever hit publish, so you can find issues before they go live.

A free plugin (with a pro option), Yoast helps improve your on-page SEO. It makes it easy to add meta titles and descriptions to your pages (an accessibility must) and also helps you check your page content. It can flag whether your images have ALT descriptions and assess overall readability.

If you want to avoid adding any more plugins to your website, there are some great third-party tools I trust.

Test the readability of your content with this free tool. With their free version, you can paste your page content in and get the grade level plus suggestions to improve your readability. It also helps flag jargon and hard-to-read sentences so you can simplify them.

One of my favorite tools, WAVE can check your overall page’s accessibility. This helps you catch any number of errors, such as missing ALT descriptions, color contrast issues, coding problems, and skipped heading levels.

You can pay a ton of money to have your website built following all of WCAG’s standards, and then one blog post can knock you right out of compliance.

If you want to ensure your website stays accessible, you need a regular content process. Build a checklist for graphics color combinations, including ALT descriptions, adding links correctly, writing at a readable grade level, and using headings in the right order.

You don’t have to create your own checklist, though. Grab our Creating Accessible Content checklist and save time and your sanity.

You can follow all of the best practices when adding new content to your website, but if it’s built wrong, students can still have issues.

Are you using a premium (non-custom) WordPress theme or page builder like Divi or Elementor? I recommend reading up on how to make adjustments to ensure you are actively using semantic HTML elements on your pages.

However, there is a reality that some of these themes just were not built with accessibility in mind. You can probably make some adjustments, but you may need a web developer to help you tweak or even explore a new website in the long run.

Offering an accessible website may be a government requirement, but your students care that you care about them. How you talk about accessibility internally matters

Try to shift leadership conversations away from “because the government is making us” or “we may get sued” to “We are helping every student access an education.”

Anyone who has worked in the classroom, even in higher education, knows that we are not teachers for the money. We do this to improve students’ lives.

Your web accessibility focus should follow that same narrative. Internal discussions reflect outward conversations, so be careful about how you discuss this with your marketing team.

Want to ensure prospective students know where you stand? While you work on improving your web accessibility, tell them what you’re working on with an accessibility statement.

This statement shows that you are committed to providing an accessible experience and to actively addressing known issues.

The web accessibility statement should be linked at the bottom of every website page (where you include links to your Privacy Policy or other legal pages). The statement should clearly show what level of accessibility you currently adhere to, address any known issues, and give your users the ability to provide feedback or request alternative formats for information. This is also a great place to include your plan and schedule for improvement.

I would recommend running a full statement by your legal representatives, but you can use the free W3C accessibility statement generator to get started.

If you are waiting to optimize your website for future regulations to kick in, you are actively losing students. Ignoring web accessibility best practices means you lose SEO rankings, 27% of your prospective students, and increase your legal risk.

Why are you opting for a leaky funnel and a whole host of other issues?

Sure, you could wait until April 2027 to launch a perfect website, but this is not about government regulation. This is about showcasing your university’s values and reaching your best students, regardless of their personal abilities.

<Plus, only 4% of the internet is accessible, so prioritizing this puts you way ahead of your competitors.

Want to know where your website stands? Book a web accessibility audit and discover your biggest repeat mistakes and maybe even where you’re doing surprisingly well.