Accessibility audits of academic websites tend to find the same things. Not missing alt text — most teams have that covered — but the quieter failures that automated scanners don’t flag and busy teams don’t see.
The recurring offenders
- Focus appearance. WCAG 2.2 strengthened requirements on visible focus. Custom-styled components — dropdown menus, accordion filters, cookie banners — frequently swallow the focus ring entirely.
- Target size. The new minimum target size criterion catches dense link lists and icon-only controls, both staples of department sites.
- Dragging alternatives. Any interaction that requires dragging — sortable lists, sliders — now needs a single-pointer alternative.
- Consistent help. If contact routes appear across pages, they must appear in a consistent order.
Why it matters more for academia
Public-sector bodies in the UK carry a legal duty under the accessibility regulations, and universities sit squarely inside it. But the better reason is the audience: academic websites serve people across every assistive technology, language, and connection quality. Accessibility is not a compliance line item — it is the baseline quality of the publishing.
Our advice is unglamorous: test with a keyboard, test with a screen reader, and put accessibility in the definition of done for every component — not in an annual audit.
A one-afternoon audit you can run yourself
You don’t need a procurement exercise to learn where you stand. Pick your homepage, a news article, a form, and your densest navigation page. Then: unplug the mouse. Tab through each page and note everywhere the focus indicator disappears, jumps somewhere surprising, or gets trapped. Open VoiceOver or NVDA and listen to the page top to bottom — the experience of hearing your own navigation read aloud is worth a dozen reports.
Then check the quieter criteria: zoom to 200% and see what breaks; switch to dark mode and check contrast both ways; fill the form in with autocomplete and see whether labels and error messages actually associate with their fields.
Building it into the workflow
- Add accessibility checks to the definition of done for every new component — not a quarterly sweep.
- Keep a short internal standard: focus visible, targets 24px, every interaction keyboard-complete, every image decision deliberate.
- Test with real assistive technology once per release. Automated scanners catch perhaps a third of WCAG failures; the rest need a human.
- Publish an accessibility statement that tells the truth, including what’s not fixed yet and how to reach you.
Institutions that do this stop needing remediation projects, because nothing accumulates. That is cheaper in every currency that matters — budget, reputation, and the patience of the people the site is for.
