Web accessibility is an important, yet often misunderstood problem and this poster session will shed some light on the types of web accessibility problems faced by universities by analyzing over 35,000 web pages at over 220 colleges and universities.  The websites analyzed include the campus, college, admissions, financial aid and disability resources websites using open source FAE technology developed at the University of Illinois.   The results for each university will be ranked based on an implementation score that is derived from accessibility rules with pass/fail results.   While many important accessibility features cannot be evaluated automatically (e.g require human evaluation), the results of the automated tests are an important litmus test of how a particular institution or website is addressing accessibility.   The ranking will be used to identify which institutions are in the Sweet 16 (e.g. highest level of accessibility) this year in terms of the accessibility of websites.  Come see how your institution did this year! 

 

The session includes information on who you can get the open source tools to evaluate compliance with WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA requirements using Illinois Functional Accessibility Evaluator 2.0 technology.   A best practices design model will be presented as an efficient and cost-effective method to improve the usability of web sites for everyone, including people with disabilities through the use of W3C HTML5 and the Accessible Rich Internet Applications specifications.  Web developers benefit from the web standards approach, since the use of web standards are more efficient for creating and maintaining web resources.   One web developer at the University of Illinois is quoted as saying “I learned these techniques because of accessibility, but I use them because they are better web design”.   Information on training