Suggestions for Faculty and Administrators
- If you don't already have one, author a web accessibility policy for your institution and enforce it. Use existing policies as a guide.
- Provide web accessibility workshops for the university community
- Integrate web accessibility training and concepts into existing training opportunities. For example, if your institution offers training in web authoring tools, add accessibility information to the curriculum.
- Be assured that the institutional community wants to do the right thing. The biggest barrier to accessible web design is lack of awareness. When administrators, faculty and staff understand the issues, they WILL do the right thing. Give them the awareness to make the right decision.
- Start somewhere. Many institutions find the task of web accessibility to be daunting. The first step to addressing accessibility is to take the first step, however small.
- Start small. Complete a small pilot assessment of a few key websites and publish your results (in an accessible format on the web) to the institutional community.
- Plan globally. Create an institutional web accessibility policy if you don't already have one. Use examples of existing accessibility plans as a starting place. Don't reinvent the wheel.
- Act locally. Web accessibility starts at your desktop. Assess the web resources you're responsible for and fix them. Tell others what you've done. Take credit for your brilliance.
- Encourage excellence. As in any discipline, excellence in accessible web design shows. Consider having an accessibility contest or set of awards to encourage excellence.
- Create a web accessibility advisory board of "experts" that may be available to answer questions about institutional accessibility.
- If you're an instructor, examine your curricula for possible accessibility issues, even if you have traditional curricula. Use free online tools such as Bobby to check your web pages.
- If you utilize course tools to create online curricula, become familiar with your vendor's accessibility features and techniques. Take advantage of these from the design stage of your course so you'll avoid problems later.
