From Complaint to Compliance: Highland Community College’s Journey to Website Accessibility

Amber: Hi, and welcome to Complaint to Compliance Highland Community College’s Journey to Website Accessibility. I am Amber Hinds, founder and CEO of Equalize Digital.

Liz: And I’m Elizabeth Gerber. I’m the Vice President and Chief Student Service Officer at Highland Community College.

Jeniece: I’m Jeniece Smith, Director of Marketing and Community Relations at Highland Community College.

Amber: And today what we’re going to be doing is presenting a case study, the journey of Highland Community College going from getting a complaint about their website accessibility to what it looks like to make it compliant now and moving forward in the future. The outline of the session is we’re going to give a little bit of history of the website, the complaint with the Office of Civil Rights.

We’re going to discuss the approach to remediation, something specific to their WordPress website, and then we’ll talk about the immediate results and what’s next. I’m going to hand things over to Liz to go ahead and kick us off.

Liz: I want to share with you a little bit about Highland Community College.

We’re located in Freeport, Illinois, which is in the northwest corner of the state of Illinois. And we’re in close proximity to Madison, Wisconsin, Dubuque, Iowa, and just a couple of hours west of Chicago. Our marketing and IT teams here at Highland are quite small. Small but mighty. The website resides primarily in the marketing team, and we get support from the IT team on the technology and infrastructure for housing the site.

But because we’re small, we rely on a lot of additional support from outside the institution. We’ll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. Our population in Northwest Illinois is declining in our service area, and it has been for quite a few years. And then our student population has also declined somewhat over those years.

However, over the last four semesters couple of years, we’ve seen increases in enrollment. But part of that is that our population is aging locally and it’s becoming more diverse. In 2017, The college used a request for proposals process to select a vendor that would work with us to redesign the college’s website and to move us to a new platform.

Web accessibility was an important requirement that we included in that proposals process for the site. But without that internal staff to manage the site, Highland has had a lengthy history of outsourcing the website’s design, development, and maintenance. The site is also hosted on an external vendor.

Highland really has what I would call an entrepreneurial approach to maintaining academic programs, and therefore there’s quite a bit of decentralized work and services here at the college. And how that relates to things like our website and social media, it means that employees have owned over 50 social media sites and accounts connected to Highland Community College.

The staff and the faculty have a lot of influence and control over the web content, and that’s resulted in hundreds and hundreds of PDFs on the website. We do have guidelines for social media and for our website. However they really needed to be expanded and they didn’t thoroughly cover accessibility in the past.

Fast forwarding to April of 2022, the college was notified that a complaint had been submitted to the office of civil rights regarding the accessibility of one of our YouTube accounts and of the website. Over the course of the next few weeks, Highland’s legal counsel worked with the Office of Civil Rights to finalize an agreement.

covering a number of different components that you see here on this slide. And we were able to influence that timeline just a little bit which was important because we really at that time in our marketing department only had one and a half positions full. In fact, our marketing director position at that time was vacant.

So it was very important for us to work with the Office of Civil Rights to try to extend that timeline as much as possible. These are a number of things that we have done and were required to do by the Office of Civil Rights. Immediately, we needed to adopt an accessibility standard, and Highland did already have one, but it was out of date, and so we had to update that through our internal Board of Trustees process.

We also needed to post on our website a notice that we wanted to be fully accessible, and we needed to tell people how to work around and get to someone at the institution to help them if they encountered any barriers on our site. Next, we really needed to move forward with conducting an audit, and that audit needed to include users who were experiencing those barriers.

So people who had disabilities maybe sight or hearing impairments, and so we needed to contract that out with a partner. Once we did that, we learned that we had, just on the pages tested, over 250 issues to address. So you can imagine, with a small team that we have, that was slightly overwhelming to be honest.

And we needed to find a partner to help us do that. So, through the process of working with another partner, we eventually found Equalize Digital to help us remediate the site. And that has meant all the world to us. It has really changed how we were able to approach getting this work done and working together as a team with an external vendor.

We also needed to update all of the protocols for our ongoing testing of the site and ongoing remediation that of course will continue for, Forever, really, because we now are fully aware and fully understand how to maintain our site and how any new components that come onto our website need to be accessible.

So we also needed to develop that plan to maintain those accessible features, and that includes any third party vendors that we would be partnering with to operate the site.

Amber: So I’m going to talk a little bit about how we worked with Highland to help them make their WordPress website accessible.

My company, as I mentioned, is Equalize Digital. We are a mission driven organization that focuses on WordPress accessibility. We do accessibility audits. User testing with people who are native users of assistive technology, accessibility remediation, custom WordPress development from an accessibility first perspective.

And we have a WordPress plugin called Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker that helps put reports in the dashboard. We also run the official WordPress accessibility meetup and we are on the core accessibility team. So we’re very embedded in WordPress and focused on making WordPress websites more accessible for everyone.

When Highland came to us, they had already had an audit done, as Liz mentioned. And so what we needed to do was set up a foundation for going through that audit. It had been done by a company that wasn’t specialized in WordPress. And so some of the issues or reports were more generic and they didn’t have really detailed guidance on how to actually implement fixes for the issues that had been identified.

So what we did was work first on setting up a foundation for making those accessibility improvements and then maintaining the site over time. Highland did not have a staging site set up. Or any sorts of GitHub repositories or a version control process for managing the changes to their themes.

So we set that up first. It’s really important when you’re making code changes to the theme, to be able to stage them and look at them somewhere else out of the public eye, because obviously we want to help Highlands maintain their brand reputation online. So, so we set that up first and then basically we had a Kanban board, which I have a screenshot of this on the slide.

It had a place where at the top we could log all of the accessibility issues that had either been identified via their pre existing audit or things that we identified while doing our audits or user testing. On the site as well. And then we had columns as we moved things through the process. So we would put a tile into remediation in progress.

Once our dev team had remediated that issue in the theme, or if it was in a plugin, or sometimes we did reach out to other third party plugins and report issues to them, once it was remediated, it would get passed over to internal QA. And then from there, it sometimes just got approved for production and went live.

Other times we had to put things into customer review. So there are some changes that are just semantic HTML. Changing a div to a button, for example, it didn’t have any visual change to the front end of the website, so that was something we could just release. Other times, there were things that did have a visual impact on the front of the website, for example, fixing color contrast, where we needed to have conversations with Highland about the contrast changes, and as a result, Those would frequently go into customer review.

They would look at what we did on the staging site. And then we talked back and forth about if that was the approved, and then if not, we might make additional adjustments or we would go ahead and then move it and push it live to production. So a big thing to think about this process is that we were continually iterating and moving through issues.

And releasing them as we could, as fast as we could, rather than trying to say, okay, we’re going to do a complete overhaul of everything and save everything to go live all at once. Because our goal was to try and make it as accessible as fast as possible. So with that, once we had established that this was going to be our remediation process, we then had to identify priorities and strategically roll out these things.

Fixes over time. So priorities being, for example, things that were in the header fixing the navigation menu as a key, there was a lot of issues with the navigation menu in the existing theme where the dropdowns, for example, couldn’t be accessed with the keyboard alone. So things like that would take high priority cause they impact every page on the site versus maybe a

link to a PDF that wasn’t identified as a link to PDF on one specific page. That’s a lower priority in that way. So talking a little bit more in depth about this, the other examples of priorities were the navigation search sidebar; heading structure got flagged in the audit; footer elements. I’ve mentioned previously looking at color contrast.

So we had to do a lot of work on ensuring there was color contrast. The website didn’t previously have focus indicators, which are the outlines that you see around elements as you tab through the website using the tab key. So making sure that those were there. Adding underlines to the links so that we weren’t using only color to differentiate when something was a link or an interactive element.

Those were all examples of things that we focused on first, because they would impact a lot of users and could be done globally. The plus side of things like this, the focus indicators, it would show up on every page as an issue, but it was one fix that just had to be made to the stylesheet, and then it would impact or resolve issues on all of those pages.

I do think it’s really important if you are having an audit that you are cognizant of this and hire an auditor who is also aware of the way WordPress works with the templates, because there were some instances where we saw that something had been reported and it was listed as, there’s 50 of these problems, but really it’s only one problem that was seen on 50 pages.

As an example. And so sometimes if you have someone that’s not as familiar auditing with how WordPress works, they might overstate the problem. So I think that’s something good to be aware of. The other things that we looked at as priorities were items that were requested by, or specific pages that were flagged by the Office of Civil Rights.

So anything that they had specifically highlighted when they did their initial audit. During the complaint, obviously we prioritized all of those things. We looked at the pages that we knew that they were going to be re-reviewing and went through those. And then we went through as we were doing it and we broke out all of the issues and we identified, is this the source of the issue that it’s coming from the code, so it’s something in the theme or a specific

code that had been inserted in, but not coming from a third party plugin, for example. So this is code that we can fix pretty easily and that our dev team would need to work on. And then we looked at Issues that were coming from the content. So things like perhaps a user had set the wrong heading level in the editor when they were editing a post or a page.

So it’s helpful to break that out because some of those items were things that the Highland team could go through and work on their own, missing alt text is another example of that, or links that have ambiguous text. ” Click here,” versus a link that meaningfully says something. So we looked at that.

What can we do? What can the Highland team do? And then we also identified any issues that were coming from third party code, which we’ll talk a little bit more about that. And that could be a third party WordPress plugin, or it could have been something that was a third party SaaS that Highland was using.

So in WordPress specifically, what we did was we added our Equalize Digital Accessibility Checker Pro plugin that includes full site scans and allows you to track changes over time, which was nice because it allowed us to get a graph and start to see as we’re fixing problems. I have a screenshot here.

This is not from Highland’s website. It’s just a sample website. But when I was talking about problems coming from code versus content, this was really helpful because it will do things like there is like I mentioned, images that were missing alternative text in this specific screenshot, there’s 531 and so a content, Specialists from the community college would be able to go in and find all those without having to click on every post and page and figure out, does this image have alt text or not?

It would just say, here’s all the posts or all the pages where there are images and here’s how you find them. So that helped us with speeding up some of the remediation, especially on the content side. We also added a couple of plugins that would do specific things to help with accessibility in WordPress.

So the Accessibility New Window Warnings Plugin, (which there are links to these in the slides that you can access) that adds the icon if a link is going to open in a new tab and screen reader text that warns people and it does it automatically. So no one has to go through and correct every link to do that.

We also added the Screen Reader Text Format plugin, which extends the block editor and allows a content creator to very easily add screen reader text without having to write any code in the block editor. And then we switched them over to The Events Calendar plugin. They had two different custom plugins.

We reported some issues that were identified with The Events Calendar to The Events Calendar and they remediated those for us. And then there were one or two things that we tweaked slightly for Highlands specifically. But getting them out of the two different custom events and into a events calendar plugin that was centralized, so there was only one on the website, was helpful. And this also speeded up because their custom calendars had a lot of issues that would have required a lot of dev remediation, whereas The Events Calendar was much closer to what we needed from an accessibility standpoint, so it ends up reducing costs on the remediation to just switch to that plugin instead.

We replaced a lot of hard coded page templates with the block editor. Their original theme as Liz mentioned was from 2017 ish, I think. So it was several years out. It didn’t support the WordPress block editor, which came out in 2018. And so there was a lot of things that the Highland Community College team couldn’t even edit.

For example, their homepage. Was completely coded in an HTML file in the theme. So while we were doing this, we took the opportunity to say, why don’t we rebuild the homepage in the block editor? And this will mean that in the long run, the community college would have the ability to edit that without hiring a developer, if they want to change what posts are being featured, or they want to add different slides to a carousel that’s on that page or change any other text or insert a whole new section.

They could do that on their own. And then within WordPress, of course, there are many plugins that websites, different websites use. And so we had to go through a lot of those and either report issues to the plugin developer, or if they didn’t do it, we did a lot of small patches within their theme to adjust how those plugins were outputting so that they would ensure a fully accessible experience.

So Jeniece, I’m going to hand off to you. You want to talk a little bit more about some of the third party platforms and the issues there?

Jeniece: Sure, thank you, Amber. So, on top of more than 1,000 website pages to consider, about 60 social media accounts, 2,000 plus PDFs third party vendors have created an additional layer of nuance in our audit.

Highland has about a dozen such vendors, I believe eleven from the platform for our athletics website to our lifelong learning course listings. And although my team in marketing owns most costs associated with the website, these individual vendors often come from other departments budgets. So this meant coordinating with those departments to reach out to the vendors, And some of these vendors were very responsive to accessibility remediation, very amenable to the process.

Others either weren’t very communicative or informed us that they would not be making accessibility remediation corrections. So we wanted to provide this information as somewhat of a cautionary tale dealing with the third party vendors was trickier than one might expect and that work will certainly be ongoing but it’s a wrinkle that we didn’t want to overlook.

So at this point, we’ll hand things back to Amber, and she’s going to give you some hard takeaways on how this has changed our website for the better.

Amber: So as I mentioned briefly, when I was talking about rebuilding the homepage and the block editor, one of the things that I really enjoyed about working with the Highland team is that they didn’t really ever approach accessibility as a burden. I felt like they looked at it as an opportunity to improve the overall user experience.

So I have a screenshot of up on the screen that shows their table where you can see the different courses that they offer with the course number, department, location, whether it’s on campus or hybrid or online days of the week, times, what semester, who the instructor is, how many seats are available in that, and the credits.

This was a table that existed already on their website, wasn’t actually coded as a table, so it got flagged because it was a whole bunch of divs. And so we talked about this. As something that obviously we could just remediate the HTML behind the existing table and fixing the filters. But then we also saw this as maybe this is an opportunity while we’re going in and working on this table.

Do we want to revisit what data is in the table? Do we want to adjust the filters? As seeing this as an opportunity to make this even more usable to students. So that was something that I thought, worked out really well with this partnership and the different things that Highland was doing was not just remediating accessibility, but also going and figuring out how can we make the website more usable for everyone overall, even typical users getting that information in front of them.

What is really neat though, I think about this and I’m going to change slides in just a minute, but. Overall, we didn’t do many design changes to the Highland website outside of the color contrast or a few things like let’s add a time of day filter or something like that. Really, we were changing a lot of underlying code and structure, not a lot of content.

Or a lot like there wasn’t like, okay, we’re going to add whole new sections of content or that sort of thing. And in fact, in some places, I think even some content that was old or out of date, maybe got removed rather than remediated because it was realized nobody used it. So from a standpoint of looking at “What the impact was,” I think it’s really interesting because a lot of people wonder how helpful is accessibility to SEO?

So I dove into Hyland’s Google Analytics account and found some interesting numbers. So in the last six months, looking at this from December, 2023 to May, 2024, compared to that same time period, the previous year, we saw some interesting gains given that there wasn’t new content added. There wasn’t a complete design overhaul or anything like that.

All we did was change that HTML architecture behind the code. And so what we see in that timeframe compared to the same timeframe in the previous year was 15.1 percent increase in unique users visiting the site. An average of one plus minute increase in the time that they were on the site and an increase in of 1.

7 percent of page views. People viewing the apply online page, which is a page that I figure is probably pretty important to the community college. So I think this is a really interesting look at how making some of these accessibility or navigation structure improvements can actually help with

organic SEO and making the website rank better and getting more people on it and having them stay on the site and actually go to the pages that you want them to go to. Jeniece, do you want to talk more about some of the, how you felt these impacts internally?

Jeniece: Certainly. Seeing those website analytics, is such an encouraging reminder for our team at Highland.

That’s I smile every time I see that slide. We don’t want to be disingenuous here and paint too rosy a picture of how all this hard work has gone, but we took this audit very seriously and we also decided we were going to make the most of it and create some positive changes. From a personal standpoint, as a somewhat new director who walked into my role just weeks after we were contacted by OCR.

I feel as though this audit could have spelled failure really easily. And here’s, here are a few of the reasons why I believe it didn’t and what we might recommend to others in our situation. So this slide demonstrates some of the more holistic results we’ve pursued on campus. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have a VP like Liz, who is willing to champion your cause.

She leaned into stakeholders across campus to build a steering committee relying on expertise from my team in marketing ITS And even an information technology faculty member to serve as our resident expert. And this group not only broke silos between our individual departments on campus, it also laid a lot of groundwork for us to make remediation a true shared governance process.

Broadening our scope this way at Highland made our work so much more collaborative. And it helped us gain buy in from leadership. This was important because to sustain this work long term, we really needed to increase our budget for work on the website and also devote more staff resources to multimedia.

A few months after we made that new hire, she and I attended a conference for community college marketing and PR professionals. And she found that we were really far from alone in what we were going through. There are more than 200 other community colleges that were recently targeted for audits by OCR.

And I, the logic for this is honestly compelling. Community colleges are, are truly meant to be a community’s college, and our mission includes serving historically marginalized populations of all kinds, including those with disabilities. So, it’s incumbent on us to show people who may choose a community college over a four year for accessibility reasons that they do belong here and that we’re here for them.

So, as I’ve shared, if you’re going through an audit like this one, the mindset that has worked for us, is to look to how we will create a sustainably accessible future. Not just getting through the audits and moving on. And this was so much more than a review of our website. We reconsidered how we configure our print designs, our brand colors, and of course all things digital from our ads to our social channels and online presence.

And that’s just a snippet of the general review that has happened in marketing. The more impactful change has been creating accountability for all of us on campus to own how we present information to students. And the true success of this effort has been in creating that shared governance with the Steering Committee.

They’ve rolled out some guidelines through our Board of Trustees to all staff and faculty on campus. We have offered some training to social media account holders on campus, as Liz mentioned. My team has also pursued some advanced training on PDF remediation, and we plan to offer ongoing employee development on accessibility moving ahead.

We’re also so thankful that we found a vendor like Equalize Digital. They have done a lot more than help us get through this audit and remediate. They, like Amber mentioned, they considered it a foundation for future work, And they even recently consulted with us and offered advice on how to responsibly propose funding from Highland for a comprehensive website redesign.

And they’ve also introduced us to IvyCat, which you saw in our last slide. They’re a very WordPress focused vendor and we have a monthly care plan with them. For site hosting, webmaster resources, developer work, and more. And in the past, much of that work was being done by multiple vendors at a greater cost.

So, this has just been a benefit all around. Our next goal is to refine our website and our internal portals on that website to serve the audiences they target. And again, it’s going to be a collective effort with lots of subject matter experts across campus and a lot of vendors. Our site still has so many pages of outdated content, not to mention the PDFs, and we will always be working to bring many of our social media account holders into compliance.

But ideally, this will help us address an overarching issue on campus of streamlining how we communicate to students on all channels, from the website to social media to email to digital signage to flyers. We appreciate your interest and attention today so much. Please don’t hesitate to contact us about anything we presented on today.

Our emails and some of our other handles are on this slide. And thank you again so much for your time.