During Stetson University’s annual Inclusive Excellence in Teaching Symposium, held at Stetson University College of Law campus in Gulfport, Florida, in February 2017, Stetson Law Professor Tim Kaye presented on the issues associated with website accessibility for disabled users on the university’s external website, www.stetson.edu.

Following the symposium, Provost Noel Painter asked campus leadership in communications, web development for DeLand and Gulfport and IT to meet with Professor Kaye and discuss steps for moving the websites forward. The meeting was scheduled for April 2017, prior to the summer break.

At the meeting, Professor Kaye, communications, web development and IT agreed that meeting minimum web accessibility standards would not suffice and the university needed to move to WCAG 2.0 AA level accessibility. The group also reviewed current known issues.

Beginning in April and May 2017, communications, web development and IT worked to identify issues associated with WCAG 2.0 AA standards and planned for the changes needed to meet these new standards. The initial list was nearly five-dozen items.

Over the summer the vast majority of the initial issues associated with web accessibility were targeted and addressed.

At a follow-up meeting responses from internal and external groups were positive toward the changes. There are three final areas for the university to address: page navigation, videos, and handling PDF structure and usage on the website. Simultaneously, the university CFO and IT department addressed web accessibility within Blackboard, the university’s online and hybrid-learning environment.

Bruce Chong