Michigan State University is enacting new regulations to raise website accessibility standards, perhaps even as early as next month. At the last meeting of the President’s Advisory Committee on Disability Issues, Sarah Swierenga, Director of the Usability & Accessibility center, spoke regarding the principles behind why the shift is necessary. Not only is there a need to address the needs of disabled students who learn from MSU websites, but also to push for much-need university-wide updates and redesigns. The new, proposed regulations would affect departmental websites and faculty-created sites that are essential for coursework, including ANGEL, MSU’s course management webware.

Swierenga showed the Committee a Camtasia video capture of a blind man trying to navigate a website using a screenreader during an usability test, and it was astonishing to see how much patience it required him to even persist in searching for the information he was prompted to find. The screenreader read each nav item every time he visited a new page, as it reads all text from top to bottom. The ultimate injustice was when he came across the correct link and didn’t know it, because the linked image had no alt tag or long desc.

Accessibility may be a hassle to code, and there is no doubt of this, as the new regulations will require coders to insert code they may never have even seen before. However, put yourself in the shoes of that man and think of how you’d feel to find a website that was easy for you to navigate. Web designers and front-end developers can easily forget this demographic when creating their mockups, and further, how to even accommodate sight-disabled users. One simple way Swierenga showed was through a Firefox extension, Web Accessibility Toolbar, but Web Developer will also work: being able to turn off the CSS will show you what HTML elements the screenreader will pick up on.

Karen Woehlert, of the Office for Inclusion, presented copies almost-finalized draft of the new regulations for us to look over, and the new changes proposed are promising in their progressiveness. I’m pleased to see that not only are they considering accessibility issues for the blind, but also into verbal and auditory components to multimedia like instructional online movies. After I raised the issue that a movement like this will take time, as it will require people to become more web-literate, she responded that the shift would be gradual and that change would occur first with ANGEL and major sites, such as Admissions and academic department sites. Given that I have only taken one course where I was required to retrieve and study information from a professor-created site, and probably have been in about ten on ANGEL, I see no problem with this approach. The board felt the same, and approved the move to raise web accessibility standards.