Website Accessibility

What is Web Accessibility?

Website accessibility is a practice that ensures that online content, tools and technologies are available for all audiences to experience regardless of ability or disability. The term accessibility might make you think of screen-readers for individuals with visual impairments but that’s only a small part of Web accessibility. 

Web accessibility considers all disabilities that affect access to the Web, including:

• auditory
• cognitive
• neurological
• physical
• speech
• visual

When adding content to a website we need to make certain it meets the industry standard for accessibility. Practicing good website accessibility not only helps us reach a wider more diverse audience; it’s the right thing to do.

Tips for Accessible Content

Accessible Web Pages and Text

Many of the choices we make, as practitioners of good website accessibility not only benefit people with disabilities they benefit all of our audiences. A carefully organized Web page with information neatly nested below informative headers is much easier to read than paragraphs of disjointed text. Web page text is far more accessible than Word documents or PDFs. If you are considering creating a PDF to link to from the Towson University website follow these helpful tips for making your PDF accessible.

Headings and Heading Order

Because most visitors scan pages rather than read them, it's very important to make  headings easy to understand, topical and follow a consistent hierarchical order.

Keyboard Navigation

Effective keyboard navigation is another way to be certain our website is functioning optimally for all users. While many of us imagine visual impairments to be the main challenge for website users it’s actually far more common to have users experience problems with motor-dexterity. Users with these challenges find it difficult to use their hands to navigate through the different sections of a webpage. Keyboard navigation — which is implemented at the code level — enables users to use the tab key to navigate to page links, headings and callouts. 

Color Contrast

Professionally designed websites often use color as a way to visually shape a webpage and help reinforce brand standards. When considering website accessibility it is important to maintain an appropriate contrast between foreground and background text and content elements and to stay clear of colors that impact users who are color blind. These standards are tightly maintained within the code of our website.

Accessible Images

Photos and images can no doubt enhance the experience of a Web page. Some images add intrinsic meaning to a Web page enhancing the text with examples and adding a layer of richness. Other images are more decorative and not essential to understanding the content. Images should never be a distraction from the content, however, and with rare exception you should avoid flashing or blinking images or short video forms like animated GIFs.

But regardless the type of image we must be certain that the information being communicated by an image is accessible to all users. One way to do this for informative images (images that serve more than a decorative purpose) is to craft meaningful alternate text descriptions.

Alt text, sometimes known as “alt attributes” or “alt descriptions,” is text (in HTML or other written, electronic copy) used to convey the image’s content or function to screen-reading software. 

• Learn More about Best Practices for Alt Text

In order to convey meaning to users reliant on screen-readers, it's important to ensure certain images don't contain embedded text — meaning text that is a part of the image itself. Screen-readers have no way to read this kind of embedded text. In addition, people with low vision or color blindness may also find text overlaid on images difficult or impossible to read.

Video Accessibility

All videos added to the TU website must be captioned. While YouTube’s speech recognition technology provides the opportunity for automatic captioning, this does not mean that the captioning process is complete. In order to guarantee accuracy you must review the captions to be certain they reflect what is actually being communicated. 

Approved Video Formats

The video formats approved to embed on a Towson University webpage are:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Panopto

For more information about the process for adding videos to your webpages please see Videos.

These guidelines by no means represent an exhaustive list of steps needed to be taken to be certain website content is accessible. Website accessibility needs to be considered whenever adding any content to our website. The guidelines presented on this page are intended for Towson University's website editors. More detailed questions about accessible web development should be directed to the Office of Technology Services.