UM to develop Web site standards to help disabled

The Information Technologies Office is creating a set of Web standards for sites connected to the University of Montana home page. These standards would help people with disabilities and make the University’s Web site a centralized unit, ITO Web designer Martha Burtis said Thursday.

Jake Sorich
For the Kaimin

Burtis said the main focus of these standards will be to unify the UM Web community based on accessibility, content, style and graphics.

“The issue of centralizing our Web community has never been dealt with before,” she said. “And these changes would make each department’s site more organized.”

Burtis didn’t know when the changes would be finalized or when they would take effect.

Dan Burke, UM’s Disability Student Services access coordinator, said these standards would allow students with disabilities the same access to the UM Web sites as their peers. He said the accessibility of UM Web sites right now is “uneven.”

“Some sites are more accessible then others,” he said. “Technology is always playing catch-up. Whenever new developments are made to a Web site, access (for disabled students) is playing catch-up.”

He also pointed out that there is no clear policy on campus responsible for online accessibility for disabled people.

“By law, we follow the Web standards given to us by the federal government, but as far as campus structure, there are no guidelines,” Burke said.

To show an example of how inaccessible some sites are for disabled students, he logged on to the Montana Kaimin’s home page. Using the campus software that reads Web content for blind people, he showed it didn’t read the news headlines first, but instead read Web jargon such as the font type and html settings. He said the Kaimin page in particular “had been messed up in terms of easy accessibility for a time now.”

Burke compared UM Web accessibility to the construction of Pantzer Hall. “Before Pantzer was built, designers looked at how accessible it would be for disabled students,” he said. “As a result they took down some barriers while building it. Web developers need to keep the same mentality and take down the barriers keeping disabled people from easy access to their sites.”

Burtis said that while accessibility is an important issue, the ITO will offer a variety of ways to implement these standards.

“We don’t expect departments to make these changes overnight, but rather make it an ongoing process,” she said.

Burtis wanted to clarify that these changes will not turn every UM Web page into a “cookie cutter” design. She said the standards they are developing are minor changes and have fewer requirements than at other universities.

She said the standards are still in the preliminary stages.

“We still have a lot of people looking over them, such as the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) team and the IT council,” she said.

Once the ITO releases these standards, Burtis said, a set of Web templates will be available to those interested in reshaping their pages. She said these templates are to be a reference only.

“They won’t solve every problem, just help departments take a step in the right direction,” she said.

Besides the templates, Burtis said, the new IT training and certification program will offer designers a chance to review the standards to make sure all departments understand the guidelines and can implement them without a struggle.

http://www.kaimin.org/test2.php?ardate=20030314&id=1098