2016 Web Accessibility Survey

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Ferdinand Rodger May
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1 2016 Web Accessibility Survey This survey Replaces the 2006 reporting requirements for web accessibility; Was developed by IBHE Web Accessibility Consortium and endorsed by Disabilities Advisory Committee; Is used to collect data for the Underrepresented Groups Report. Purpose: To encourage the formation of a committee or process that will collaborate with various constituencies on campus involved in the development of web-based information, instructions, and internal processes, like registration. Information and Resources on Accessibility Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act of 2007 (IITAA) (30 ILCS 587): This Act has specific implementation requirements for all four-year public institutions and is the baseline standard for web accessibility. Although the IITAA does not apply to community colleges at this time, community colleges are encouraged to use the IITAA requirements and benefit from the activities related to IITAA implementation in other state institutions. Web Application Accessibility: Web applications must be accessible to people with disabilities. Commercial web applications for course management, web mail, campus portals, and content management systems may not be accessible and may not allow modification. Institutions are encouraged to work with companies or open source projects to improve the accessibility of web applications. Technical staff that understands the technical details of accessibility can help create statewide networks to work with companies and open source developers to improve accessibility. Note: The IBHE Web Accessibility Consortium currently supports many multi-institutional efforts on improving the accessibility of web applications. Links: IBHE Web Accessibility Consortium Ill. Inform. Tech. Accessibility Act (IITAA) (30 ILCS 587) IITAA Standards IITAA Purchasing Group for Higher Education

2 I. Campus Involvement 1. Which campus constituencies address web accessibility issues? Please list below. UIS Office of Web Services handles web accessibility issues for all official department and unit websites. 2. Please mark an "x" by each campus unit that participates in web accessibility issues. x a Academic Officer representative (i.e. Provost, Vice President, Chancellor) b Human Resources c Public Affairs or Marketing d Foundation/Marketing x e Disability resources x f Instructional technology g Library x h Information technology x i Faculty representative x j Student affairs k Registrar, Admissions and Records l Procurement/Purchasing m Athletics x n Other units, please list the units who participate. UIS Office of Web Services, Chancellor's Division II. Activities 1. How do you communicate your web accessibility practices to faculty, staff, students and the general public? Every month our unit conducts training on web development and design. Web accessibility is a part of these training sessions. Online resources have been created for all campus website Authors and Editors, which highlights accessibility guidelines and how to conduct accessibility checks for their websites. In addition, the Office of Web Services conducts accessibility checks throughout the year. 2. What unit or committee has responsibility for monitoring and coordinating the overall implementation of campus web accessibility activities at your institution? The UIS Office of Web Services in the Chancellor's Division. 3. How does your institution coordinate and promote accessible web design on campus to web developers and what training resources are available to assist developers in learning about accessible design practices? We continue to utilize the resources of the U of I's Office of Disability Resources and Educational Services, as well as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), which is a consortium of the Big Ten universities plus the University of Chicago. Additional

3 resources that are used for accessible design practices are W3C and WebAIM. Student assistances in the Office of Web Services also utilize resources from Lynda.com. 4. What criteria does the institution or committees use to prioritize which web resources to make accessible? We begin our evaluation from the university homepage and then conduct FAE and W3C checks for all campus websites that reside on the official web server. For FAE, we validated all our themes, which are applied to all the web pages. For 2016, we are waiting for an update to the FAE that would allow us to check content for all the web pages. 5. How are students involved in identifying web accessibility issues on campus? The Office of Web Services, which creates and maintains the campus homepage, toplevel recruiting pages, and department websites, continues to regularly ask for and receive feedback from our students regarding the primary UIS website. 6. How is web accessibility addressed in your campus strategic plan? The university s Web Policy highlights different aspects of web accessibility. 7. What are your web accessibility procurement requirements? x Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA) standards IITAA Purchasing Group for Higher Education Other: 8. Does your campus participate in the IBHE Web Accessibility Consortium? x a Yes b No 9. Do you include web accessibility as part of your disability awareness activities / training on your campus? a Yes x b No III. Progress and Future Plans 1. Define your accessibility requirements. x Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act of 2007 x Other: We continue to follow the options offered by the IBHE for Web Accessibility annual reporting. UIS has chosen the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines as its Accessibility Standard. These guidelines are part of the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which develops strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the web accessible to people with disabilities. In addition, UIS utilizes the Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE, version 2.0) developed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

4 2. List the evaluation tools and procedures you use to evaluate accessibility of web resources at your institution. For 2016, we conducted comprehensive accessibility evaluations [W3C Validator and FAE] for all official department and unit websites. 3. Summarize the progress your institution has made during the past year. a Web pages that have been evaluated for accessibility compliance and the results. We evaluated all university websites for There are 158 department and unit websites and the UIS homepage. All these websites were validated using W3C HTML Validator and FAE. Certain code updates were made to the websites themes to meet web accessibility requirements. b Web sites brought into compliance. We evaluated 158 department and unit websites using W3C HTML Validator and FAE. The themes that are used for the websites and the websites are all compliant. Once the update for the FAE is in place, we will run another check for content on all the department and unit websites. Note: We were unable to resolve certain scripts provided by external entities such as YouTube, Flickr, older versions of Flash content, and internal WordPress embeds. Additionally, we were unable to resolve minor issues with the WordPress shortcode library, a few WordPress HTML formatting issues, and a few issues with tables. There is a Heading- 1 warning in W3C validator and resolving it is raising a warning in the FAE validator, which was left unresolved. 4. Summarize your plans to improve in the next year. a A list of web sites you plan to evaluate for accessibility in the next year. All our websites and the themes are compliant. As always, we conduct comprehensive checks FAE and W3C for all university websites. b A list of web sites you plan to bring into compliance during this next year. There are no websites in the queue that need to be made compliant. Our websites themes are compliant. New websites that are created for departments and units are based on these themes. When a website Editor or Author completes web development training, they are informed and educated about web accessibility. Several resources are shared with website Authors and Editors. The Office of Web Services conducts web accessibility checks throughout the year. We also remind our website Editors and Authors about web accessibility by sharing our online resources. 5. How are you monitoring ongoing compliance with web accessibility requirements on your campus? For 2016, website Authors and Editors have begun to monitor their respective websites for web accessibility. For example, when they add a photo to their website, they

5 add the necessary text attribute pertaining to web accessibility. In addition, they follow a semantic structure for their web page content. The Office of Web Services has online resources that allow individual departments to evaluate and fix web accessibility. The Office of Web Services continues to monitor all campus websites for accessibility standards. IV. Web Application Accessibility 1. List the web applications your institution uses in each of the following categories: a b c Course management systems x i Blackboard ii Moodle iii Sakai iv Angel v Desire2Learn vi Other: Campus portal system x i uportal ii Other: Web mail i Mirapoint ii Google Mail x iii Other: Outlook Web Access 2. List the activities and the progress of your campus during the past year to improve the accessibility of these web applications. Our Enterprise Identity and Access Management system, through which users set their passwords, replaces the previous password reset page, which did not meet accessibility standards. 3. List your planned activities to improve the accessibility of these web applications during the next year. We also introduced CaptureSpace Lite to the campus as a lecture capturing service (replacing TechSmith Relay). CaptureSpace Lite includes the ability for users to upload scripts and/or closed captioning files to their videos, improving their accessibility when shared on websites or in Blackboard.

2014 Web Accessibility Survey

2014 Web Accessibility Survey This survey Replaces the 2006 reporting requirements for web accessibility; Was developed by IBHE Web Accessibility Consortium and endorsed by Disabilities Advisory Committee;