Our Commitment to Accessibility
At Western Washington University, everyone should be able to learn, work, and Make Waves. We do our part each day by making our digital content accessible for all users. Accessibility means Western websites, media, documents, and other applications are usable to everyone, including people with disabilities.
Making accessible content ensures equal access to education, the services we provide, and above all, the Western experience.
Conformance
Western continues to work towards Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 level AA conformance. These guidelines are outlined in the policy 1600.07 Ensuring Accessible Electronic Information Technology.
Additional accessibility considerations
Although our goal is WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance, we have also applied some Level AAA Success Criteria. Examples include:
- Some pages use breadcrumb navigation to assist with site navigation, and indicates the user’s current location within the navigation.
- Our Drupal, WordPress, and Azure-hosted sites use landmarks to indicate major sections of our pages.
- Line heights and font sizes on most pages are not fixed, so they should be readable at 200% font size and above.
- Controls like buttons and links in the theme have adequate touch target size, measuring 44 by 44 pixels or larger. Some patterns in our library also meet this height requirement, such as styled links, image buttons, icon with text links, and interactive cards.
- The main Western web theme continues to refine support for users' display preferences, such as using Windows High Contrast Mode.
- Text alignment adheres to best practices, such as not being justified.
Current and Ongoing Efforts
- Employ a web accessibility engineer and digital technologies accessibility coordinator.
- The Information Technology Accessibility Committee (ITAC) meets monthly and includes key staff and faculty across Western's departments.
- All web editors take accessibility training before editing websites.
- Site editors also have access to web improvement software which can point out any content accessibility issues, and show how to fix them.
- We develop and maintain accessibility guides in our Brand and Communication Guide.
- Current email, imagery, social media, and video guides include accessibility info.
- The Accessibility Guide specifically highlights best practices for web accessibility.
- Western's main web theme, Ashlar, is designed to be as accessible from the ground up and meet WCAG 2.2 at Level AA at its base components.
- We continually test for accessibility and improvement in our theme and components.
- Ashlar includes a set of accessibility tests for each pattern, which automatically check for issues before changes go live.
- Leveraging our theme allows for the rapid creation of websites that are accessible and mobile-first.
- WebTech has built and maintains the Descriptive Alt Text Generator, a tool Western website authors can use to make their informative images more meaningful.
- WebTech contributes fixes to accessibility bugs found in the Drupal system and the modules we use. Previous and current work and patches is located in the issue log.
Technical specifications
Western's websites are developed to work in various operating systems and browsers. The following lists contain the most common systems, but not all.
Supported Operating Systems
- Windows
- Mac
- iOS and iPadOS
- Android
Supported Browsers
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Edge
- Safari
User Settings
Western's Ashlar-based websites are designed to work regardless of user preferences such as:
- different display modes like high contrast or color filters,
- magnification and zoom, and
- browser text sizes.
Learn how you can adjust your browser's display or text size as you prefer.
Ashlar-based websites also come with a Display Settings feature, which currently supports changing the font type and turning on dark mode.
Reach out or report
To report an accessibility barrier to the Bias Response team, please fill out the Bias and Discrimination reporting form. You can also report barriers, or ask questions, by email or phone.