If you’re following the Digital Accessibility Office’s accessibility compliance plan, you know that step two is to create an accessibility audit. This audit is an inventory of your, or your unit’s, current digital content and technologies. The audit is a living document that helps you identify needs and prioritize any necessary remediation efforts.
Your digital content inventory should include all the information and experiences available on the web that you create or maintain your role, like text, images, audio, videos, course content and documents. It should also include web pages and platforms, like mobile apps and third-party platforms, that house digital content.
Creating a content inventory might seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be.
Here are three tips from Chelsea Porter, Head of the Digital Accessibility Office, to get started, prioritize content, join an engaged community and tackle your digital accessibility audit.
1. Write it down
Porter’s biggest tip is to just start writing. The inventory “doesn’t have to be anything super fancy. It can be a basic Excel document,” she said. “Figuring out what all you have and just writing that down is a huge first step.”
The audit, whether you are completing it for your own work or on behalf of your unit, should be a list of the digital content your unit owns. This may include your unit’s website(s), PDFs and other digital documents, video, audio, social media, newsletters and online course content and things like documents and videos in those courses. Your inventory will also include third-party content, like content your department purchased, third-party content used in courses and vendor-created content.
When creating your inventory, consider tagging or categorizing your content. Categories — like social media, videos, images, websites or forms — will give at-a-glance insights. These tags may help you prioritize your work, think of alternative solutions, and they may help you determine which training courses you should take.
2. Set priorities
Looking ahead, the third step of the accessibility compliance plan is to “improve it.” In that step, you remediate accessibility barriers and create accessible proactive workflows. But you’ll need to know where to start — this is where your inventory shines.
As you look at your content, “you might find that there’s half of this we can just put in archives,” Porter said. Or, it may be easy for your team to look at the audit and make quick decisions like “let’s knock out the home page of the website. Let’s knock out the course content we have for students first. Then we’ll worry about that newsletter from 2019 to see if we still need it or not.”
Ask yourself questions like: is this content still relevant and useful? Does it align with our current goals and messaging? Who is the intended audience and how frequently do people access it?
Answering these questions can help you make informed decisions about what content to keep, remediate or archive. A solid goal is to direct resources to the most frequently accessed content first.
Keep in mind that your department’s priorities may be influenced by contract terms, grant deadlines and other factors that require the use of different prioritization frameworks.
3. Team up, explore resources, join a community
Remember that you’re not alone in accessibility work. While Porter recommends that everyone who creates or maintains digital content take a look at their content, she emphasized that this is a team effort, both within your unit and across the University.
Team up
“It is everyone’s responsibility to work on this,” Porter said. “Groups should think ‘We can bring this together and work on it as a team.’”
When working with your unit, your inventory will help everyone understand the scope of work ahead. Ultimately, everyone will have something they can contribute to creating accessible content.
“That inventory can definitely help you see how many resources you need and how to allocate them,” she added.
Explore resources
It’s also important to know the resources you have across your unit and across the University. The Digital Accessibility Office has some self-service resources that can help you get started.
“We’ve got some resources and things that you can tinker around with on our website,” Porter said.
You may find a template or framework that simplifies the task and or offers guidance on how to organize your inventory effectively. But she emphasized that “what works best for each team — their time, their resources — will look a little different.”
The Digital Accessibility Office also has developed and will continue to create an array of resources and training opportunities, including:
- Instructor-led training and specialized workshops covering diverse topics, such as web accessibility, captioning, document remediation, social media accessibility, Universal Design for Learning and disability etiquette
- E-learning courses on Digital Accessibility Awareness and Digital Accessibility in Course Design
- Personalized consulting sessions to support your team’s compliance plan
- Guidance to help University entities understand and meet the new legal requirements and develop compliance plans and procedures
Join a community
You may also find support from peers. To connect with fellow Tar Heels, consider joining the Digital Accessibility Liaisons. Digital Accessibility Liaisons advocate for accessibility within their department and act as a resource to their colleagues. The liaisons group offers an opportunity for the Carolina community to work together and share compliance plan resources across departments. Faculty and staff can join the Microsoft Team or connect with a school or departmental liaison.