Why Accessibility Matters
Creating accessible content is crucial for ensuring everyone, regardless of ability, can perceive and interact with your website. Since millions rely on assistive technologies to browse the web, prioritizing accessibility is often a legal mandate. Beyond compliance, these guidelines frequently overlap with SEO best practices; better-structured content is easier for both users and search engines to understand.
We are Committed
At University of Utah Health, we believe that health care is a fundamental right, and access to health care information is an essential part of that right. Whether a viewer is using a screen reader, a magnifier, or voice recognition software, our goal is to ensure that everyone's experience on our website is seamless. We recognize that our digital front door must be open to everyone. We are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance or ability.
We use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA as our guiding light to help us make the U of U Health website a positive place for everyone.
What You Can Do
While we handle the framework updates, your role in managing site content is just as essential.
- Staunch the flow of new inaccessible content—We recommend you closely review and follow the Drupal trainings and guides as they have been updated to include accessibility requirements. This proactive approach allows you to ensure accessibility before new content goes live, effectively staunching the flow of additional inaccessible content being added to the site.
- Remediate inaccessible content currently on your sites—Older content that cannot be addressed by framework updates still must be remediated. Webmasters should reach out to the Digital Experience Team as they are able, to request Excel copies of the AxeMonitor or Acquia Optimize Scans for their sites. They can then address the manual remediation fixes on their sites that framework code updates cannot. These manual updates include and are not limited to:
- PDFs (add/improve appropriate tagging)
- Videos (add/improve captioning & audio descriptions)
- Image (add/improve alt tags)
- Broken Links (fix/remove)
Accessibility Resources
How We are Supporting You
If your site is hosted by Drupal, we are currently writing custom fixes on our design system code to address issues like contrast, tagging, keyboard navigability, etc. These issues, once addressed, are fixed across all sites.
We are also running AxeMonitor scans and Acquia Optimize scans frequently to catch new issues as they surface. We have a small team of Part Time Employees working exclusively on manual remediation of high priority content across our sites that don't necessarily have webmaster oversight.
Where to Get Help
If you have any questions or require Drupal assistance, please utilize the following resources:
- Accessibility Guides: For more information and best practices, please visit our home ADA Digital Compliance SharePoint site.
- Webmaster Support: For Drupal queries or Drupal webmaster support, please review the links on this current page.
- Video Accessibility: All Video accessibility questions can go to Jen Pilgreen Jen.Pilgreen@hsc.utah.edu
- General Support: For general questions around this project, please Teams message Makenna Homer to request to join our Help Chat on Teams.