WordPress dominates NC State University’s web landscape largely because of its ease of use. Whether it’s a faculty member’s research group, a student’s class project, or an admin assistant updating the departmental website, web content is being published by anyone and everyone on campus—and everyone is able to learn how to use it, with minimal strain on our IT training capacity.
But with so many content creators who have so little training in web best practices, we quickly encounter accessibility challenges. How do you teach an entire university campus when to use headings, how to measure color contrast, or what alt text is? How do you make sure the decentralized campus web landscape is an inclusive one?
In this lightning session, we showcase the “NC State Accessibility Helper,” a homegrown plugin that uses the tools WordPress gives us to put accessibility testing and learning resources in front of content creators before they hit the “Publish” button. We will demonstrate the user experience and briefly walk through how this simple plugin works under the hood.