Web Accessibility & UX Drive Website Success

Your website is your most powerful marketing asset – is it pulling the weight it should be?

University websites are complex. They must serve diverse audiences—prospective students, current students, faculty, alumni, donors, and community members—all of whom have different needs and technical abilities.

How do you build a website that can serve all of these people and have it provide any kind of return on investment?

When creating the website and design, you need to consider all the nuances of your core audience. This means that we prioritize web accessibility and user experience (UX) from the beginning of any website rebuild and ensure they’re thought through during every change to the website.

Let’s explore the intersection of web accessibility and user experience and how it creates a more inclusive, effective website.

From the beginning of working with a new client, I let them know that our design will focus first on being accessible and user-friendly. We like pretty designs, but they have to be usable pretty designs.

Why is that?

Because when everyone can use your website (and use it without a lot of thought), you’ll get higher conversions and a stronger university brand.

Before we delve into how web accessibility helps your website, let’s be clear about what it really is.

Every year, when I teach my Digital Marketing class, I get students who think web accessibility means that everyone can access your website.

Ehh, yes and no. Yes, they need to be able to access it, but they also need to be able to understand and use it.

Web accessibility means that we design and build websites so that everyone can access and navigate them, no matter their abilities. 

We often talk about web accessibility in the framework of the POUR principle, meaning a website is Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust for everyone. That means individuals with visual or hearing impairments can use your website and get all the necessary information. It also means you’re helping students with ADHD, dyslexia, and other disabilities use your website.

Put simply, user experience covers how your users (your students, faculty, community members, etc) feel when they’re using your website. Do they find it easy to navigate through and find the answers to their questions? Are they frustrated by anything? Do they have to spend a short or long amount of time to find something on your website?

With UX, we focus on the users’ journey through the website, making sure that we’re using clear calls to action, providing clear navigation, and easy information so they can keep moving through to what they need.

A simple example of UX would be adding a Login button to the top right corner of a website menu when you need to have an account to place an order.

When your website offers a good user experience, you’re allowing those prospective students to quickly find program information or making it easy for a current student to get information on scholarships and financial aid.

You can probably imagine, but when we are trying to provide a good experience for all of our users, we’re often going to be following web accessibility best practices.

There’s a lot of overlap between web accessibility and user experience, including:

• Providing a clear navigation: Benefits both users with disabilities and those who are brand new to your site.
• Logical information hierarchy: This is essential for screen reader users and anyone trying to find specific information quickly.
• Descriptive link text: Helps screen reader users understand where a link leads, but also helps every user have a clear understanding of what they’re clicking on.
• Mobile responsiveness: Crucial for accessibility and assistive technology, but also a cornerstone of good user experience since many of your users may be browsing on mobile first.
• Clear language and easy readability: Helps your users with learning disabilities or ESL speakers understand your content quickly, but makes it easy for everyone to understand.

When you design for the people in your audience who need a little extra help, you often are creating a better user experience for everyone.

As an organization, you’re under no legal obligation to provide a good user experience. You are required, however, to ensure your website follows web accessibility standards. Under Title II of the ADA, Section 504, plus just normal ADA requirements, your website needs to provide a good, usable experience for your users with various disabilities.

Harvard lost an accessibility case in 2019 for not providing captioning on all of their videos. Other universities have been targeted for similar suits, often to help encourage compliance.

Beyond the legal obligations, why would you want to spend the time and money to make your website accessible and user friendly?

Because you’re going to see an increase in conversions. Conversions on your website means more students, more donations, more community involvement.

When your website is accessible and easy to use, it’s easier for those audience members to find exactly what they’re looking for and make a decision.

Prospective students now have an easier time finding program information, scheduling visits, and can apply quickly.

Current students have a reduced frustration in accessing resources, meaning they’re spending less time asking your staff the same questions over and over again.

Alumni and donors can quickly find how to give, register for events, and network with faculty and staff.

Faculty and staff get efficient access to internal resources, improving internal productivity.

But web accessibility and user experience goes beyond just making everyone’s lives easier. 

While search is changing, we all still want our websites found on Google. To do that, our website needs to be built with good on-page search engine optimization built in. 

Web accessibility and UX are basically the same as on-page SEO best practices.

Google and other search engines are looking for the most accurate, relevant websites to share with their searchers. They want the results they deliver to also deliver the answer to their searchers’ questions and not have them hitting the back button looking through more search results.

When a website is built with accessibility and UX in mind, it’s making it easier for Google to understand your website overall.

That well-structured HTML and logical information hierarchy helps Google to understand what your website is about and what questions you’re answering.

Accessible and user-friendly websites keep your visitors engaged, telling Google that your content is valuable to their searchers.

When you’re following web accessibility best practices, like adding ALT text to images and providing transcript alternatives for videos, you’re helping Google understand all of the content on your website.

A site that is accessible and user-friendly also tends to run faster and do better with mobile-first indexing, meaning you’re improving overall user satisfaction with your website.

All of these benefits combined tells Google your website answers their searchers’ questions, provides valuable information, and leads to higher rankings in search results.

You want your website to be found and convert prospective students into current ones, but where do you begin?

You start with understanding where your website stands now and then working on improvements so that it’s easy for everyone to use and understand.

With a web accessibility audit, you can see a clear picture of what’s working and what needs to be fixed so that you can reach all of your prospective students.

Make these fixes a priority to ensure that you’re not only compliant, but that you’re going to bring in conversions.

Once you have an audit and you’ve even started to make changes, remember—web accessibility and user experience aren’t a static, one time fix. You’ll need ensure that you’re following best practices with any content you add to your website.

But once you start putting your audience first and providing them with a website that works for them, you’ll stand out from a crowded market.