What is accessibility?
Accessibility means creating websites that are usable for everyone, including people with disabilities and people who use assistive devices. The most common types of accessibility issues that NUSites’ users are most likely to encounter are:
- Visual: users who are blind use software called a screen reader to help them access website content, so content should be created with this software in mind.
- Motor: small buttons and other interactive elements of a site may not be easy for users with motor difficulties to use.
- Auditory: users with hearing difficulties may not be able to access video content unless captions or a transcript are provided.
Why is accessibility important?
It is important to ensure that all users are able to access information about Northwestern University’s programs and events in order to promote a truly inclusive environment. Creating accessible web content results in a better digital experience for everyone.
Accessibility Tools for NUSites
Plugins
Plugins are optional extensions to WordPress that can add new functionality to a site. To learn more about using plugins with NUSites, please read our intro to plugins.
Accessible Content Plugin
The Accessible Content plugin is designed to check your pages and posts for potential accessibility issues and highlight any content that needs attention. Learn more about the Accessible Content Plugin.
Accessibility Plugin
The accessibility plugin helps with a variety of common accessibility problems in WordPress themes. It adds many helpful accessibility features that can be enabled or disabled based on your theme’s needs. Learn more about the Accessibility Plugin.
Accessible Social Share Plugin
The Accessible Social Share plugin adds accessible social sharing buttons to every post and page, so readers can easily share your content on their social networks. Learn more about the Accessible Social Share Plugin.
Themes
You can change the look and feel of your site by selecting one of over 200 themes. NUSites offers many themes that were built with accessibility in mind. To learn more about themes, please read our intro to themes.
See a list of accessibility-ready themes that are available in NUSites.
Additional Tools
SensusAccess
SensusAccess is available to the Northwestern University community. It is an online document conversion system that converts text and image-based files into more accessible formats. It can also be used to transform text and image-based files into different outputs including audio, Braille, or e-text formats. SensusAccess is meant to compliment accessibility services. It will not make a document fully accessible, but for images and image-based PDFs, it can create a readable, tagged document that will only require some simple manual additions for full accessibility. Learn more about using SensusAccess.
Siteimprove Content Auditing
Siteimprove is a content-auditing tool that checks web content for accessibility, broken links, spelling errors, and more. It is available to the Northwestern University community. Learn more about Siteimprove and how to request access.
Learn More About Accessibility
Complete Guide to WordPress Accessibility
This guide is provided by CampusPress, the platform that powers NUSites. It provides a great general introduction to web accessibility, and then delves into WordPress-specific issues. Read the guide.
Northwestern University Office of Equity
The Office of Equity provide a wealth of guidelines and information on how to create accessible content for the web. Visit the Office of Equity Digital Accessibility site.
How People with Disabilities Use the Web
This resource from the W3C gives examples on how people with different kinds of disabilities use the web. It can be helpful to understand how users with different abilities experience the web so you can know what issues to pay attention to when you are creating web content. Read more.
Web Accessibility Tutorials
This collection of tutorials shows you how to develop web content that is accessible to people with disabilities, and that provides a better user experience for everyone. Read more.