Texas State ranked No. 1 for website accessibility among institutions with 20,000 or more students

Inside TXST

Jayme Blaschke | February 25, 2020

Pope Tech, a web accessibility testing company, has named Texas State University’s website the most accessible of any higher education institution in the U.S. with enrollment of at least 20,000. 

Pope Tech studied sites run by Texas State and 3,837 other institutions as part of their “Higher Ed in 4K Project.” Web accessibility means that websites, tools and technologies are designed and developed so that individuals with disabilities can use them.

Texas State’s top ranking is the culmination of efforts from every unit at the university. The mobile/web department in Technology Resources makes regular accessibility updates to the university’s content management system, to ensure content editors are equipped to succeed. University Marketing works with the Division of Information Technology to create accessible designs and steward public-facing websites with accessibility as a core value. Texas State leadership also contributed to the accomplishment by providing additional governance for remediation efforts and by reviewing and acting upon quarterly accessibility reports.

University web content editors have diligently tended to their monthly reports, working hard to repair accessibility errors found on their webpages. The accomplishment would not be possible without their continued efforts.

Higher Ed in 4K Project

Pope Tech’s Higher Ed in 4k Project was created to evaluate and rank U.S. higher education institutions’ web accessibility. All institutions using the .edu domain in the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) list were selected. The resulting sample included 3,837 institutions. The University of Texas, Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University were among the Texas institutions in the 20,000 or larger group in the study.

The Pope Tech team used their accessibility evaluation platform to scan each institutions’ homepage and a maximum of 99 other webpages that can be reached from the homepage or pages linked from the homepage. This sample set was aggregated and evaluated into the rankings.

Pope Tech is powered by WebAIM’s WAVE API, a set of tools that checks webpages against current accessibility standards (WCAG 2.0) and reports suspected failures.

For additional information, please visit the Higher Ed in 4k Project website.

The Future

Despite the recognition, accessibility work is not complete at Texas State. Accessibility is part of a workflow that touches every change made to web content. It is a core component to making Texas State an inclusive institution of higher education.