In the last 10 years, there has been an increasing demand for designers to meet accessibility requirements when building school websites These requirements are set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), in order to make web content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities.
These disabilities include blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities and photosensitivity.
What do these requirements mean for schools? How does this affect education providers? Here's a fresh look at a few guiding principles when designing school websites to be accessible.
Accessibility Requirements
The W3C created the Website Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 to assist education providers in producing accessible pages and content.
This means that schools should adhere to these guidelines in order to ensure that their websites meet basic accessibility standards. The W3C breaks down web content and the accessibility guidelines for schools into the following categories: perceivable, operable, and understandable.
1. Perceivable
1. Provide text alternatives for any non-text content (e.g. images, emoticons). This ensures it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language.
2. Provide alternatives for time-based media (e.g. videos, audio files).
3. Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simpler layout) without losing information or structure.
4. Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.
2. Operable
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Make sure all the functions of the website can be accessed by a keyboard.
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Provide users enough time to read and use the content.
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Don't design content in a way that is known to cause seizures.
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Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are.
3. Understandable
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Make text content readable and understandable.
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Make web pages appear and operate in predictable ways.
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Help users avoid and correct mistakes.
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Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.
Accessibility Trends
It can be challenging to design a school website for different demographics to ensure that your website can be accessed by all prospective families. Schools need to try to meet the standards set out by the W3C, but also their local Education Department standards.
Here are some important accessibility trends and statistics to consider for education providers.
Designing for Seniors
Looking at Australia as an example, seniors spend an average of 12 hours per week on social platforms. This equates to 3.3 billion hours, across Australia, every year. With seniors embracing technology, schools need to make sure that their websites are perceivable, operable, and understandable by people of all ages.
Designing for people with blindness and low visibility
The CDC in the US, estimates that there are 4.2 million people over 40 who suffer from uncorrectable vision impairment. This number is expected to continue to grow. Schools therefor need to make their web pages friendly for people that are blind or have low vision.
Designing for people with epilepsy
According to the CDC, “Approximately 1.25% of the US population had epilepsy in 2015. That equates to over 3 million adults 470,000 children. That means in a school of 1000 students, 6 students may have epilepsy. For this reason, schools web pages need to be thoughtfully designed for people with photosensitive epilepsy and reflex epilepsy.
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