When the Office for Civil Rights sent out complaints to over 150 schools in August of 2017 I saw opportunity. With the full backing of the Southwest Tech administration we not only thought through the accessibility issues that were currently on the site, but looked forward for ways to enhance the site to become not only compliant, but truly accessible in the full spirit of the law.
In doing so, Southwest Tech has remained at the top of the accessibility audit done yearly by the WebAIM. Since September of 2017 and through the publishing of this post, the WebAIM Million project has reported no accessibility errors on the SWTC.edu site. That’s just where I like it.
No other state of Wisconsin school (technical college or university) has maintained their site with no accessibility errors.
Student Designs College Website
To further the initial work done to create a fully compliant website, we undertook a complete website redesign project headed by my student worker. One of the requirements for this project was to not only maintain the error free website, but to make enhancements for accessibility.
Some of the enhancements utilized during this project were:
- The inclusion of a Skip to Content link
- Mobile-friendly and completely accessible site navigation
- Use of HTML 4 elements replacing existing ARIA notations
- CSS 3 grid system used to easily display objects from desktop to mobile and everything in between utilizing the same content without duplication on pages
- Responsive forms that inform users with all abilities of errors
The website redesign took just six months with only my student worker and myself working on the project while maintaining the current site. How many students get the opportunity to design their school’s website? What an opportunity.
To this day, I know of no other institution who has had it’s main website redesigned by one of their students.