Cultivate an empowered pool of web editors remotely (or otherwise) and help them help you!

The primary goal of most university websites is highlighting their growth, accomplishments, and distinguishing factors to attract top applicants. Our secondary audiences, the current students and faculty, become just as important to keep a high student retention rate. At Georgetown Law, it is inspiring to see all our staff dedicated to supporting both the current and prospective students in this endeavor. Being the largest law school by enrollment, Georgetown Law comes with an additional challenge when maintaining an accessible digital platform: constantly growing and changing web content affected by a high turnover of trained web contributors.

Since I started onboarding and training new web contributors, I have noticed that it is not the lack of awareness or tech-savviness that prevents them from posting accessible content most of the time, but mostly the lack of support they feel they have in order to accomplish what is being asked of them. We found a solution to this hopelessness in one key area: inaccessible documents. As a law school, the number of documents on our website never goes down, it only goes up. It is virtually impossible for a web contributor to gain expertise in PDF remediation and do that remediation for all of their department’s documents, in addition to their day-to-day responsibilities.

This session will enable managers and coordinators to build that community of accessibility practitioners who then encourage their peers and colleagues in non-digital roles to look at their processes from an accessibility perspective. This shift in mindset has resulted in more awareness around digital accessibility and made administrative and office staff more willing in supporting an overwhelmed web contributor struggling to get all digital content accessible. I will share stories from different GU Law departments that have gotten their staff to think about accessibility proactively, which, in turn, has helped the law center improve their web accessibility metrics. It is a team effort, and the heroes are not just the ones that edit the sites but also the behind-the-scenes coworkers who generate the content.