NewView Partners with UCO to improve accessibility

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Accessibility is important for higher learning institutions looking to support a diverse faculty and student body.  Large institutions tend to have robust websites with an exceptional amount of content and a large number of PDF documents.  In an effort to better serve individuals with disabilities and to ensure compliance with Oklahoma and Federal laws, the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) was in need of a partner to support them in testing the documents they were making available to their student body, their faculty and staff, and the general public.  

At NewView, the READable team offers hands-on accessibility testing that goes beyond visual accessibility. This team tests for ease of use for all disability types, including mobility, sensory and cognitive disabilities. READable considers the difficulty of utilizing various controls and the use of logical short sentences. NewView is the only accessibility partner based in the state of Oklahoma that engages in both automated and manual testing. 

STRATEGY

The Plan

UCO and NewView partnered together to create a plan for ongoing remediation with the goal of achieving 100% compliance organizationally. Below is an overview of items considered in the development of that plan:  

• Legacy, or previously authored documents: the content of these documents is more evergreen in nature, but the lack off accessibility of these documents still required them to go through remediation. 
  
• New content creation:  
  
  • The plan had to consider a system that would allow documents to be tested in real-time as they are created to ensure ongoing compliance. 
    
  • The need to account for new content creation also required the implementation of training for staff and employees to help them to understand and begin implementing accessibility best practices. 

Execution

NewView began by scanning UCO’s public-facing website and immediately identified over 2,000 documents with accessibility challenges. With this many documents in need of remediation, it was important to start by prioritizing documents.  NewView’s READable team ran this list by UCO’s ADA team, and UCO provided support by identifying the following:  

• Which documents belonged to which department? 
  
• By department, which documents were top priority?

Through this process, NewView was able to identify the first 100 documents to be remediated. From there, the READable team was able to move into remediation through the implementation of a multi-layered approach to resolving the following issues:   

• Document remediation.
• Education and training of UCO staff to prevent some of the common problems from continuing to occur moving forward.
• Consultation with UCO staff to set up preventative measures to catch accessibility issues before documents are published. 
• Proposed long-term plan for continued document remediation, training and consultation. 

Results

Often, organizations will rely on digital scanning to determine their levels of accessibility, but digital scanning can often miss things that manual testing will catch. This was the case with UCO as NewView set out to begin testing the PDF documents being utilized across the organization.  

Through a combination of digital scanning and manual testing, NewView Oklahoma was able to successfully partner with UCO to remediate 100 top-priority documents being used across the organization and to train their faculty and staff in best practices for creating accessible documents moving forward.  

do you need help with document remediation or website accessibility?

Complete the form below and someone from our READable team will reach out.