Replacing an Accessible Website: Ensuring a Better New Site

Date & Time

Friday, March 17, 2023 - 2:20 PM PST  

Location

Grand GH  

Description

In early 2020, California State University, Northridge (CSUN) undertook a redesign and upgrade of our enterprise or administrative web presence. CSUN, as you might imagine, has a long-term investment in the accessibility of our official website. The challenge became to finish the project with a new web presence that is at least as accessible as the one it replaced. CSUN has the Universal Design Center (UDC), a team dedicated to the CSU's Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI). The UDC partnered with the project co-sponsors and their vendors on the accessibility requirements for this project. In this session, UDC team members will explain our approach to this project, the steps we took to ensure the new web presence was accessible, and lessons learned. Accessibility is a shared commitment as CSUN, and the project sponsors included it as a requirement beginning with the vendor selection process. Still, garnering explicit executive support was a critical first step. Throughout the project, we advocated for accessibility in planning and goal-setting. The UDC team gave feedback on early designs, tested prototypes, then tested pre-production pages. We'll describe our testing methodologies in detail. Training editors is vital so that content meets accessibility guidelines. We'll address the training hand-off from the vendor to the UDC team. No project is perfect. Finally, we'll talk about things we might have approached differently, and what we learned from this project.  

Audience

• Higher Education
• Information & Communications Technology
• Government
• Media & Publishing
• Marketing

Audience Level

Intermediate  

Session Summary (Abstract)

If you've already made your enterprise website accessible, but it’s due for an upgrade, how do you make sure you’re moving forward on accessibility? We faced this challenge in our web redesign project; we'll share what we did and what we learned.  

Primary Topic

Web  

Secondary Topics

• Design
• Development
• Evaluation & Remediation
• Leadership & Strategy

 

Session Type

General Track  

Presenters

• Kate Tipton
  CSU Northridge
• Alen Davoudian
  CSU Northridge

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