ISU Digital Accessibility Policy and the ISU Sites+ Platform

ISU Digital Accessibility Policy and the ISU Sites+ Platform

The Digital Accessibility Team at ISU recently held a webinar regarding the big update to the digital accessibility policy. If you are responsible for a website on the Sites+ platform, here's what you need to know:

  • Iowa State University has created a digital accessibility policy that states all new digital content produced and purchased must comply with WCAG Version 2.1, Level AA, by April 24, 2026.
    • A notable update is that the deadline moved up from Juy 1, 2026 to April 24, 2026.
    • Next Step For You: all public-facing webpage content must have a 95% or higher score in Siteimprove by August 1, 2025. Our team is working to remind editors to review and update content to meet this goal.
  • Websites on the ISU Sites+ platform are born accessible, meaning they have been designed from the ground up to meet digital accessibility standards so that all users, regardless of their level of accessibility need, can access online information.
    Our platform enables a wide variety of technical capabilities and visual layouts while still being intuitive and easy for editors to use. Most importantly, the final product is mobile-friendly and meets legal accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.1 AA).
  • If your website is still on the Luggage platform (based on Drupal 7), our team has a plan for migrating you before the compliance date.
  • We use the Siteimprove tool to help our website editors stay in compliance.
    The websites on our platform are accessible upon creation, but updates from content editors may alter the score of the website’s accessibility. Siteimprove crawls the web content to find accessibility issues that need to be addressed promptly. See our post “Your Siteimprove Dashboard, Explained” for more details.
  • We also support editors by sending recurring reminders to log in to the Siteimprove dashboard and focus on specific areas of improvement.
    • Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to receive updates from the team, as well as a monthly reminder to review specific aspects of your website’s accessibility (e.g., broken links, misspellings, image sizes, etc.)
  • It is the responsibility of the website admin/owner and their team to be sure their content is in compliance. The web team and the Digital Accessibility Team are here to support editors with question.

Accessibility guidelines: 

Create accessible links

  • Make sure your link text gives the visitor proper context. Consider a link labeled “here” vs a link labeled “common accessibility issues.” In the first example, you aren’t sure where “here” is taking you. In the second, there are proper contextual indications for a visitor who might choose to follow the link.
  • Make sure all links are working. Sometimes link destinations are unknowingly moved or removed. It’s important to monitor webpages that you link to to be sure they are still accurate.

Always provide alternative text for media

If you find that an image adds enough value to your sighted visitors to add it to a page, you should always consider the experience of someone using assistive technology. Alternative text is not optional in an accessible world.

Page load speed correlates with image file size

Internet speed is a privilege. Make sure you are sizing your images as small as possible without disrupting quality. Large files slow down page load speed. A good rule of thumb is 1 MB or smaller. Learn more about properly sizing your images.

PDFs

Convert your PDF content into web pages whenever possible. This will provide a better user experience, make updating your content easy, make your content more searchable, and be more responsive to different device sizes. For documents that must remain PDFs, be sure they are tagged and structured correctly. Siteimprove has a tool that checks your PDF documents. It can be found in the left sidebar menu under Accessibility, PDFs. Visit the digital accessibility toolkit provided by the Digital Accessibility Team for more information on creating accessible documents.

Headings should follow a hierarchical structure

Heading tags help assistive technology users understand the structure of your content. Many use the headings to navigate through the pages and find the information they are looking for. Consider this experience when applying headings to a page.

Test it out! If you removed all of the paragraph text on your webpage, does your page read like an outline (good!), or is it chaotic?

Misspellings

Cleaning up misspelled words and reducing jargon will help increase your website’s accessibility score and search engine ranking.

Update website content

Have your pages been reviewed and updated within the last year? Common problems our team observes are outdated policies, outdated course numbers, and outdated and duplicate copies of PDFs. Staying up to date on website content avoids these issues.

 

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