What’s Done by the Website Provider
When choosing a website developer for your school district, ensure you choose one offering accessible websites. A good website developer considers accessibility needs right from the start and builds accessibility requirements into their Content Management System (CMS). Your web developer should ensure that the website is coded correctly so that website visitors can use accessibility tools easily on the website. This includes the ability for visitors’ tools to reformat content, change fonts, use a screen reader, have keyboard navigation, and more. While many of these details are technical, a capable developer ensures your website is compatible with all of these accessibility tools.
Consistent, user-focused navigation is a huge part of website accessibility. Consider how users find pages on your website:
- They look for a page name in your menu.
- They see a page name displayed clearly at the top of each page.
- They can read the page names easily in their browser tabs.
Your web developer's responsibility is to ensure page names are delivered in these readable, consistent ways all across your websites. This makes the user experience better for everyone, but it's important for visitors using assistive technology to read your website.
Your URLs should also be friendly and reflect the page they refer to. For example, at a glance, you can see that www.rallyonline.ca/blog will take you to our blog page. It’s common to see a long string of characters and numbers following a domain, making it impossible to guess which page the URL refers to.
We know schools and school districts love an image carousel. While they seem like a great way to get content in front of visitors, they often hide important content and can create accessibility barriers. People read at different speeds, and it can be very frustrating for anyone with a reading disability to read through text on a carousel before it changes. They'll leave your website if there's no way to pause the carousel or flip through the images. This is why many website providers don’t recommend carousels - they’re not very effective at communicating information, and some visitors can’t engage with them. Only put an image carousel (or other moving content) on your website if visitors can control it themselves.
Your developer should also consider accessibility in the website’s design. Proper contrast between different colours makes the content easier for visitors to read. A professional designer will choose colours that make it easy for all visitors to see your content and ensure that an inquisitive web admin can't accidentally change those colours.
We could list many requirements here, but as a school district communicator, ensure you’re checking with your website provider if their websites meet the current accessibility standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We recommend using a third-party tool, like Google Lighthouse, for automated accessibility testing rather than a developer’s built-in solution that might not show some development errors. While automated tools like Google Lighthouse are great for identifying lots of common accessibility issues, many WCAG guidelines have to be tested manually. A good web developer knows how to test for possible issues that automated scanners will miss.