According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, websites of public universities must comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. This ensures that content is accessible to people with disabilities including blindness/low vision, color blindness, movement limitations, learning disabilities, and others.

Many of these required elements are already included in the Gator Engineering template, but there are several things you should keep in mind when populating website content:

  • Make sure that all images, videos, and other non-text content have a text alternative (e.g. alt text or longdesc). The text should convey meaningful information that helps a user who cannot see the image understand what it is. For example, rather than giving a photo of Dean Abernathy the alt text “dean.jpg” a better alternative would be “Portrait of Dean Cammy Abernathy.”
  • Avoid using “click here” or generic phrases, as well as full URLs, for link text. Generic phrases can be confusing when read by a screen reader out of context, and full URLs are read aloud by a screen reader. Instead, use brief yet unique and meaningful link text like “Register for the cybersecurity talk” whenever possible.
  • Avoid setting specific font colors and sizes. Users need to be able to manipulate color and size in browser displays to make it more accessible to them, and dictating those settings often makes this impossible. The Gator Engineering theme formats content appropriately and accessibly according to whether it is a paragraph, list bullet, header, or other content element.
  • When designing graphics that include text, make sure there is high enough contrast for the message to be understandable even with limited perception of color.
  • Make sure text in PDF documents is text based, not image based.

If you have questions about whether your content is accessible or need assistance, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Accessibility Tools

SiteImprove

SiteImprove is a cloud-based product that automatically identifies SEO, accessibility, usability and quality assurance issues on UF websites, including:

  • Areas where content or site design does not fulfill accessibility requirements
  • Broken links
  • Misspellings
  • Media files that have not been updated recently
  • Images larger than 1MB

And many other possible issues. Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering has an account with UF’s instance of SiteImprove. To gain access to reports for your website, contact the webmaster.

SensusAccess

SensusAccess is a document conversion system that converts documents into accessible formats. SensusAccess is available to UF students, staff, and faculty.

For best results when converting to tagged PDF, use the “image over text” document type.

More Accessibility Resources