How many of these things have you tried?
None of them produce spectacular results.
First, think about who your webmasters are. At NIU, the webmaster is often a secretary or administrative assistant who may or may not have any web skills. Sometimes a graduate assistant who happens to have web skills designs a site and maintains it but leaves after graduation. No one knows how the site works, or even where the server is when it goes down.
Now think about your university’s website. It’s an eclectic collection of widely varying designs. Some are accessible, some are definitely not. There are animated gif’s, garish color schemes that normally sighted visitors can hardly read, site designs that do not include a link to the university’s homepage and navigations that lose visitors.
At Northern Illinois University, the solution is the university template. It was created with accessibility built in, and with a few other things your university administration wants very much:
Since October 2006, when the NIU homepage, www.niu.edu , went live in a new university template, 124 departments, divisions, schools, colleges and organizations have voluntarily moved into the new template. 19 more are in progress. Why?
Creating momentum
Continued effort by Public Affairs staff
"This is easy!" convenience for webmasters
A Web Presence Committee sponsored by the Vice President for Administration and Outreach included high-level executives in Enrollment Services, Outreach, Information Technology Services, Public Affairs and the Provost. The agreement was that all departments at the table would adopt the template, resulting in approximately 60% of the NIU website having a unified look.
The NIU homepage was the first site to go into the new university template. It went live the day of the president’s State of the University speech in October 2006, in which he stated his approval of the template and encouraged everyone to use it.
A presentation on the template to the Council of Deans by the Assistant Vice President of Public Affairs and NIU homepage webmaster was greeted with applause. Many of these deans went back to their schools and requested that all the sites in their areas go into the new template.
This is a key element to success, especially regarding webmasters with skills and ideas of their own. As more and more sites go into the new template, it becomes more and more obvious when one "falls off” the template. Web sites not in the template suffer from a perceived lack of credibility as visitors ask "Where am I?”
Members of the Web Presence Team in Public Affairs put up a website about the templates, http://www.niu.edu/webpresence/ . They met with groups wanting to move into the templates to explain how the templates work, create a new left navigation with them, and decide how the present site content will move into the new templates. Accessibility is woven throughout the discussion, from the accessibility of the templates to the basic principles of creating accessible content. Accessibility is presented not as an obstacle but a feature of the new site.
As of this writing, 124 sites have moved into the accessible university template without a marketing campaign or a web accessibility workshop. Support is provided on a custom level. Some webmasters just need the templates and go from there. Others have the Web Presence Team move all the content and hand back a website that’s ready to simply maintain. Training on the university content management system is provided once a month in completely full classes and on an individual as-needed basis and always includes basic accessibility.
Many of our webmasters are thrilled to have a site they can maintain easily. They know that they can call the Web Presence Team if they need help. Most of the content they want to put up is accessible.
When content is not accessible, it becomes a learning opportunity for the webmaster. A member of the Web Presence Team explains what needs to be done and will even make the changes for the webmaster. The resulting page is now a model for that webmaster to follow in similar situations.