OTAN News

Creating an Accessible Website

Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay

As we mentioned during the launch of our new OTAN website, one of the large goals that we focused on while creating the new site was adding accessibility features. The new OTAN website has a number of options for users with accessibility requirements when viewing the site, including easy ways to increase the font size, switch from regular to high contrast mode, underline all clickable links and highlight all clickable links in yellow, and switch from regular color to grayscale mode. You can review this OTAN Website Accessibility Features Handout on the OTAN website to learn more about our website accessibility features.

No matter how small or large your website is, the reality is that your website should be accessible for all users. In her blog post 3 Steps to Creating An Accessible Website, Lisa Nielsen offers some ideas about how to get started creating an accessible website:

• Choose a WCAG 2.0 Compliant Theme or Template – An easy way to create a website, depending on the tool that you use, is to choose a ready-made theme or template. However, make sure to choose one that is WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 or 2.1 compliant. That way, accessibility features are built into the site already.
• Create Accessible Content – All of the content that gets added to your website should be accessible. Lisa provides a list of the most common steps to take when creating new content or remediating old content. She also includes some links for further information. We also recommend reviewing our previous OTAN news items Making Our Content Accessible for Students and More Resources to Create an Accessibility-Friendly Environment for additional information and resources to explore.
• Develop an Accessibility Testing Plan – Once your website is up and running, now and into the future, you will want to test on an ongoing basis to determine where your website is not accessible and what items need to be fixed. WAVE is one example of a tool to use that can help.

We hope you will explore accessibility tools that can help make your content accessible for all of your students and users. If you need more information, please contact us at support@otan.us or call our office at 916-228-2580.

Article: 3 Steps to Creating An Accessible Website Lisa Nielsen at the Innovative Educator

OTAN News Item: Making Our Content Accessible for Students

OTAN News Item: More Resources to Create an Accessibility-Friendly Environment