Template for Institutional Web Accessibility Activities

Institutions who wish to document web accessibility efforts as part of continuous improvement for reaffirmation may benefit from a template to collect institutional data and information. This template provides a guide for doing so. This template can be used in conjunction with the Best Practices for Institution-Wide Web Accessibility Document to help provide a structure for including web accessibility efforts in reaffirmation reports or quality improvement outlines.

Ensuring that your institution's web presence is accessible to all, including those with disabilities, is not only the right thing to do; it also provides a number of benefits to your institution:

• It reflects institutional mission, leadership and values.
• It affects constituents at every level of your institution: including students, faculty and staff, prospective students and staff, and alumni and community members.
• It promotes sound fiscal policy: It is more efficient than after-the-fact fixes; assists in recruitment and retention of students and faculty with disabilities that affect computer and internet use; enhances collaborative possibilities in both the US and abroad; protects the institution from some legal complaints; supports public relations and development work and; satisfies the expectations of funding agencies that have begun to require accessible information communication for some grants and contracts.
• It adds value: It assists students for whom English is a second language; it supports multi-modal learning; it allows access by those using older equipment, slow modems, or in places where sound is not allowed and; it is likely to help your website continue to work as technologies evolve (forward compatible). Furthermore, accessible content tends to have a higher return on prominent search engines (e.g., Google) and is more robust. This means it should work more reliably across different browsers and devices, such as netbooks and mobile phones.
• Finally, it can also provide a value-added benefit: the foundation for web accessibility is present in the existing guidelines of all regional accreditation agencies' standards, criteria and principles. Your institution's accessibility work may be useful in helping make your case for compliance as you prepare for reaffirmation. You may even be able to use your efforts as a component in quality improvement plans.

While each institution is different and you will have to look at your web accessibility efforts in terms of your own academic venue, you may find a multitude of opportunities to use your digital accessibility efforts as evidence of compliance for your regional accreditor or as part of your quality enhancement schemas.

These templates are provided to help you to organize and outline your evidence. Some examples of evidence are provided for each benchmark. However, they do not represent the full spectrum of evidence that may be appropriate for your institution. For more detailed examples, please review our Web Accessibility Template Examples.

Please feel free to use and adapt the templates to best suit your institutional needs. Depending upon the conventions of your accrediting agency, you may choose to highlight your web accessibility efforts as a whole, describing how each benchmark is applicable to the requirements of your agency; you may choose to embed specific benchmarks into the narrative of your evidence for a given principle, criteria or standard; or, you may adapt the template in any other way that makes sense for your venue. Samples of how the templates can be incorporated into reaffirmation materials will be presented in next month's newsletter. You can cut and paste the pieces into other reports, add additional columns and outlines, mix and match, or consolidate the information as you see fit. The template is available as a Word Document to make it easier to incorporate into your existing documents.

Download the Template for Institutional Web Accessibility Activities

Please note: Below are two example sections of the template. The template format is the same for all benchmarks except the templates for Indicator 2, Benchmarks B and C: (An Accessibility Policy and A Written Accessibility Plan). These templates are set up to indicate the robustness of the documents based on important components that should be included in comprehensive policies or plans. To see the whole template, download the word document.

Indicator #1: Institutional Vision and Leadership Commitment

Benchmark A: The Commitment of Administrative Leadership

Evidence of Administrative Leadership can include:

Indicator #2: Planning and Implementation

Benchmark C: A Comprehensive Written Accessibility Plan

Written Accessibility Plan Checklist*:

*Put any additional elements of the plan in the spaces provided