Weighing Your Accessibility Options

To manage your site’s digital accessibility, you will need to create a remediation plan for existing content and set a procedure for monitoring new content for accessibility. In order to create these plans, your team will need to set aside time to learn about digital accessibility, understand your site’s accessibility health, and adopt a plan. There are many options available for your team to help manage your site accessibility. Some services will evaluate and report on your site’s accessibility; these reports can then be used by your team to determine what issues you can resolve in the site content. Other services, such as the AudioEye Ally Managed Service, will analyze, remediate, and monitor your pages for you. This article outlines, in a general sense, what effort is needed to remediate and manage your site accessibility on your own versus using a managed service such as AudioEye.  

Remediation and Maintenance Procedure In House

Remediating your site content can be done within your school with the help of your content creators, training from accessibility specialists, and time. You will need to make a plan for remediating existing content and also a strategy for monitoring new content.  

Remediating Existing Content

• Learn about the current accessibility health of your site by performing an accessibility scan with an evaluation tool. Note: Accessibility evaluation tools will only catch a percentage of errors; manual testing is needed to gauge the true accessibility health of your site.
  • Free in-browser evaluation tools, such as WAVE, will scan one page at a time.
  • A paid evaluation tool is needed for a full site scan.
• To help understand the evaluation tool results, become familiar with the WCAG 2.0 Level AA Success Criteria, sign up for training, or consult with an accessibility specialist.
• Organize the results into errors, warnings, and items that need manual review.
• Identify and remediate the content-related errors.
  • Focus first on the homepage, landing pages, and the pages with highest traffic.
  • Continue to manually crawl the site to assess and remediate issues.
• Create an accessibility statement and link it in your footer navigation.
• Reach out to third-party vendors to update their platforms to resolve issues.
• If you find any errors with the front end (CSS/JS), contact Finalsite to have us look into resolving them.
• Consider testing your pages with manual assistive technology, using your keyboard and a screen reader.

Monitoring New Content

• Consider tightening publishing permissions to only those who have been trained in accessibility.
• Audit content that is fed in from other sources, calendars, and social media.
• Set content standards for content creators (e.g., no "click here" or images of text).
• Organize training for your content creators to learn how to create accessible web content.
• Set up an accessibility procedure for anyone who can create, edit, or publish pages.
• Test any new pages before publishing.
• Monitor the content that is fed in via third party, such as Twitter or Facebook.
• Monitor the entire site on an ongoing basis, as accessibility is impacted every time new content is added or edits are made to existing content.

Remediation and Maintenance Procedure with AudioEye

The AudioEye Ally Managed Service will manage the accessibility of your site content for your school. The service will reduce the amount of time and resources needed to remediate existing content and any new content that is added to the site.

Remediating Existing Content

• Sign up for the AudioEye Ally Managed Service (toolbar is included).
• Schedule a kickoff call with the Support team to go over the implementation details and ask any questions about the process and how the Ally Toolbar is used to communicate each phase of accessibility.
• Send communication to your constituents about your commitment to greater inclusivity through accessibility and the new usability tools that will be available on your site via the Ally Toolbar. As the process progresses, each phase is communicated publicly.
• Gather updates from Finalsite Support about the implementation.

Monitoring New Content

• AudioEye regularly monitors the site to ensure conformance with WCAG 2.0 Level AA is maintained no matter how the site grows.
• The AudioEye Help Desk, available through the AudioEye toolbar, allows site visitors who encounter any accessibility issues to communicate directly with AudioEye.
• AudioEye can make recommendations and provide third-party resources for making videos accessible.
• AudioEye can also provide recommendations on making PDFs accessible.
• Follow additional steps to ensure accessibility of new content, including:
  • Consider tightening publishing permissions to only those that have been trained in accessibility.
  • Set content standards for content creators (e.g., no "click here" or images of text).
  • Create an accessibility statement and link it to your footer.
• AudioEye will send a report that provides a general outline of what accessibility issues were found, and AudioEye will make recommendations for future content.
  • From the reports, your team can set up an accessibility procedure for your content creators.
• Remain confident that, if some content isn’t added in an accessible manner, AudioEye’s experts will catch and remediate the issue, ensuring ongoing compliance. This can keep the focus on the organization's marketing and communication goals and avoid focusing only on providing accessible content.

Regardless of which method you choose, it is important to make sure that your site is available to all potential families and individuals who choose to visit. If you would like more information about in-house remediation, feel free to check out our Knowledge Base articles in the Accessibility Section. If you are interested in the AudioEye service, please reach out to your Client Success Manager.