Accessibility is one of many keys to providing a better user experience on your website. The basic purpose of accessibility guidelines is to help guide web creators toward practices that can make their sites easier to use for everyone, whether they are people with disabilities or not. Please visit webstandards.vcu.edu for the list of VCU guidelines regarding accessibility.
Why make content accessible?
Accessibility means making web content available for as many users as possible.
Visitors who should be taken into account when thinking about accessibility on the web are often not just visitors with impairments, but also users with slow connectivity or small screens, users who speak English as their second language (ESL), or users who are new/inexperienced with technologies.
At VCU, diversity and inclusion are the norm, and users who require additional accommodations to browse VCU’s online resources shouldn’t be an afterthought or exception.
You are also required to make all VCU websites accessible.
VCU Accessibility Checklist
The website passes the WCAG 2.0 Level AA accessibility standard
The website contains zero HTML validation errors
The website contains a link to a “text only” version of the website
After the opening body tag a div with the id of “skip-links” must be included and enclose a series of skip links. You are encouraged to include skip links to major pieces of your website template, but the skips links must include at least one to the main content section.
The website should also be readable with stylesheets turned off.
Federal Accessibility Checklist
Pages must include skip to content links
Title tags need to be unique for each page
Form inputs need to have associated labels
The entire site needs be navigable with only the keyboard
Non-trivial images must include alt text
Links need to have meaningful text and tell users where they are being pointed to
For all PDFs, users must be able to highlight text in a logical order and copy it to another program
Videos have to be captioned
Pages must set an appropriate language
Suitable color contrast ratios between text and background