Harvard University’s official Digital Accessibility Policy outlines our roles and responsibilities as web editors, as well as the standards to which our website adheres. (If you’re interested in taking a deep dive into accessibility standards, view the WWW Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, level AA Conformance.)

Most of the WCAG pertain to developers and the HLS site was developed with accessibility at the forefront, so it’s not necessary for most web editors to know all the guidelines.

Structure and organization 

Proper use of headings is key. The H1, H2, H3, and other H tags are not just styling, they are functional and tell screen readers (as well as users and search engines) the order of your content. Use them often and appropriately. 

The title of your page, which will always be an H1, should be descriptive yet as brief as possible, and unique to your section. For instance, many sections may have contact pages, so Contact Housing is a better page title than Contact Us. 

Use H2s for your primary subheadings, H3s for secondary, H4s for tertiary, and so on. This allows readers to scan and understand your content easily.

Important: Do not skip heading levels. For instance, you cannot go from an H1 (the title) to an H3. You need to have an H2 in between. The headers are functional, not decorative.

Tips for writing headings:

  • Avoid using internal terminology, including jargon and acronyms, especially if they have not already been spelled out on the page.
  • Try to use terms and phrases your readers might naturally use when searching for a page.
  • WordPress will always automatically apply the H1 tag to the title and there should only be one H1 per page, so you should never have to manually apply this tag. 

See the university’s guidance and resources on headings, lists, and tables.  

Image and Media Alternatives

Always provide alternative descriptions (alt tags or alt descriptions) for images, captions for video and transcripts for audio files. This allows people who are vision or hearing impaired to enjoy and understand your content.

Alt tags are short, meaningful descriptions of images that are not purely decorative. Not all images require alt tags. You can view this handy decision tree if you’re not sure what qualifies.

This article from HubSpot has many examples of good and bad alt text.

Audio and video must be transcribed or captioned by a reliable source. Auto captions on YouTube are not usually high quality. Services like Verbit and 3Play Media can provide accessible transcripts and captions. 

See the university’s guidance and resources on captions and video descriptions.

More accessibility resources:

Accessibility Resources

Harvard’s Digital Accessibility Services office (DAS) has extensive resources and training to help our community adhere to accessibility guidelines. Explore their website to learn more, whether you want instructor-guided courses, self-guided trainings, office hours with digital accessibility experts, or quick answers to your questions: accessibility.huit.harvard.edu.

Learn more about creating accessible Word documents, Adobe files, and multimedia: hls.harvard.edu/web-accessibilty.

More resources:

Tags: Accessibility

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