Why it Matters
As a public agency and educational organization, Canyons School District is committed to making its websites accessible to all students, parents, patrons and employees. This means making information available in multiple languages and following accessibility standards toward complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
What is Web Accessibility?
Web accessibility refers to the design and publishing practices we use to remove barriers that may prevent people who have disabilities from interacting with our webpages. Our District and school sites are designed with accessibility in mind. The blogs and headers, for example, were designed to be clean and clutter-free while providing a good contrast between the text and the background. All our web properties work on mobile devices and multiple browsers. They also are organized to meet the user’s needs, or to be easy to navigate and consistent in how they function.
But there are additional steps that web managers can take when publishing blog posts, adding hyperlinks and embedding images.
- Make hyperlinks contextual. When embedding a web link in a blog post, use descriptive language, such as, “view our brochure.” Screen readers read the link text, and linking to words, such as, “click here” gives people no information about what they’re clicking on.
- Name your graphics and photos before uploading them. You can add an Alt field for images in your media library to help describe what’s happening in the image, or write a detailed caption. It also helps to reference an image within the text on a page or blog post.
- All videos should have closed captioning.
Guidance and Accessibility Testing
The U.S. Government has published a resources page with information about how people with disabilities use the web along with tools for testing the ADA compliance of your website.
