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Some Thoughts On “Managing Accessible Content on Thousands of Sites”

Jeremy Felt gave the below talk at this year’s WordCamp US, in which he details how just over a year ago, Washington State University received a complaint through the Office of Civil Rights that some of their web pages were not accessible, and what they’re doing to resolve the complaint. I have some thoughts that I’ll share after the video.

Download “Managing accessible content on thousands of sites” directly.
There are a few things that stood out for me in this talk. First, the transparency. I’m glad to see some universities detailing how they’re resolving OCR complaints, because it shows universities who are in the process of figuring out how to resolve complaints a path forward. The talk also demonstrates that, if a university with five million URLs to handle can get the process going, so can universities with smaller web footprints, and even K-12 schools with tiny budgets. Washington State has even made their tools and related documentation freely available. Free as in other universities can download them and use them without spending budget. I’m sure other universities have also made tools available, but this is a pretty extensive collection, and they’re not even all WordPress. So if a school isn’t using WordPress, there’s still something here they can use. Not that schools had any excuse before now to use to suport waiting to make their websites accessible, because the laws governing website accessibility for schools are not new, and there have been a metric ton of OCR complaints already. Now, not only do schools have no excuses, they even have free resources they can deploy so they don’t have to create them on their own. I’m going to be spreading this talk and the linked resources as far and wide as possible.

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