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Accessible Technology

Websites

Website designers, developers, content authors, and others who are responsible for UW websites, are responsible for ensuring their websites are accessible to users with disabilities. The UW provides a variety of tools, resources, and services to help with this effort. This page features a recommended path.

Step 1. Build an understanding of digital accessibility

This website can help. The following pages may be especially helpful:

Also, a wide variety of Training Opportunities are available at the UW, including a recent addition, Deque University, an extensive library of asynchronous online courses on digital accessibility (free to everyone in the UW community).

The UW also hosts a wide variety of meetups, trainings, workshops, hackathons, and study sessions focused on digital accessibility. Please see our Events page for current and upcoming events.

Step 2. Clean house

A big step in ensuring your content is accessible is deleting content that is no longer needed.  If content is no longer actively maintained but is needed for reference, content should be clearly marked as “Archived”.

Additional tools and guidance will be available in early 2025. Please check back again soon for updates.

Step 3. Use UW-branded themes

The standard UW WordPress Theme has been created with accessibility in mind, and accessibility continues to improve through a close collaboration of University Marketing and Communications (UMAC) with UW-IT Accessible Technology Services. Website owners are encouraged to use this theme. Free WordPress hosting is available on a limited basis from UMAC for UW organizations, and on a more widespread basis from UW-IT through the UW Sites Network.

Also, the UW Drupal community has created a Drupal version of the standard UW theme and has worked to include its same accessibility features. More information is available on the Community Themes and Modules wiki.

Step 4. Prioritize and review your websites

Accessibility is a journey. Where do you start?  Digital assets should be prioritized by the critical nature of their functionality, their volume of traffic, and whether users with disabilities are known to have a particular interest in them. Starting with the highest priority websites, use the following tools and procedures to evaluate them:

  1. Test with a keyboard. Set your mouse aside and use the tab key to navigate through your web pages. You should be able to access all interactive features (e.g., menus, links, form fields, buttons, controls) and operate them by pressing Enter, space, arrow keys or other intuitive keystrokes. If you are unable to access some of your site’s features, your site is likely to have accessibility problems.
  2. Use accessibility checkers. There are several free online tools that will check your web pages for accessibility.  See our Tools and resources page for an annotated list, as well as our DubBot page for information about our enterprise web accessibility checker.
  3. Conduct a manual review. The UW Web Checklist was created to help UW web designers and developers to evaluate their websites or web applications for accessibility, UW branding, and style. The checklist is an Excel spreadsheet, and can be downloaded, duplicated, and customized for use across multiple web pages and projects.

Step 5. Get help

If you get stuck with any of the previous steps, or simply have questions along the way, UW-IT Accessible Technology Services is happy to help. Please see our Help page for options.