Postsecondary institutions should use website templates to ensure accessibility: Opinion

All postsecondary institutions should have a standardized accessible website template, write Evan Pickrel and Kimberly Conner. Pickrel and Conner write that students who use assistive technology depend on websites to be designed accessibly, but web accessibility is complex and multi-faceted. They explain that one of the best ways to avoid accidentally creating inaccessible sites is to use a standard, template for all digital content. These templates eradicate most or all common accessibility issues, provide an error-free environment for web editors, and may already be aligned with the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. “Standardization has an appreciable impact and makes it incredibly easy to identify high-risk, high-volume problems and immediately fix them with one update to the content manager,” Pickrel states. Campus Technology Note: Archived stories may contain dead links or be missing source links.