ACCESSIBLE SCHOOL WEBSITES

Web accessibility means that everyone, regardless of their ability, can navigate, understand and interact with your digital content. People access websites in a range of ways. Some people may use assistive technologies like screen readers and keyboard navigation.  

Websites should be accessible to all. Unfortunately, a lot of websites are not made with accessibility in mind.  That’s why we encourage all of our users to create their school website with accessibility best practices. Ultimately, it is the website creators responsibility to ensure their website can be accessed by everyone. It is also a legal requirement in some countries. Meaning that your school could face a lawsuit if your website is not accessible. 

There are lots of factors to consider when creating an accessible school website. Many countries have adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), a series of guidelines to improve web accessibility. Additionally, countries may also have their own standards and requirements. It is best to check with your local government to find out what the requirements and guidelines are for your country. Once you know this you can apply this to your own school website design.

Once you know the relevant requirements and guidelines you can begin making your website accessible. You can do this yourself or use a managed solution like AudioEye, an industry-leading technology, to ensure compliance.

If you plan to do this yourself using our school website builder you’ll find lots of ways to make your website accessible like adding alt tags to images, labels to forms, adding custom code and more. Again, check the guidelines and ensure you follow them when designing and building your website. Your site must also have an accessibility statement.

We always design school websites using accessibility best practices. To assist us as we’re building we use an amazing free evaluation tool by WAVE. If you are making your own accessible school website we encourage you to use this an evaluation tool.

The WAVE tool has lots of features. It highlights errors and alerts in your website allowing you to go back and make the necessary changes to your site. Although this is a powerful evaluation tool nothing replaces a real person auditing and reviewing your site.

We understand how complex it is to create and manage an accessible school website and a lot of our users may not have the time to become accessibility experts.  For that reason, we wanted to find a simple solution that our schools can use to create and maintain an accessible website. We have researched lots of different solutions and we are pleased to recommend UserWay who our leaders in digital accessibility solutions. UserWay offer a free and premium Accessibility widget. The free widget provides partial compliance and their premium plans ensure full compliance with an advanced AI-Powered Accessibility Widget. With UserWay, you can ensure compliance and accessibility from day 1 of using their solution. 

UserWay is also a Privacy by Design organization meaning their solution is also COPPA, FERPA, HIPAA and GDPR compliant.

*The link below is an affiliate link. We may receive a commission for purchases made through this link at no extra cost to you. We only recommend third-party services that we believe are useful to our schools and readers.

We hope this guide has helped give you some insight into what web accessibility is and the steps needed to achieve an accessible website. If you plan on making your website accessible yourself then we'd encourage you to do further reading and have provided some useful links below.  Also, remember that web accessibility is always evolving so you will have to maintain your website regularly and if you'd prefer to outsource to make your website accessible then check out AudioEye's solution.

If you have any questions please contact us.

We offer special discounts for multiple school websites for districts or counties.  With special district plans for our school website builder and discounts for our school website design and build service.