Accessibility and Screen Readers
Department of Web Design, Architecture, & Services
Web Services
Martin Hall Room 302
401.865.1755
web@providence.edu
As Web Editors for Providence College, it’s our job to ensure that our pages are accessible and viewable by everyone, regardless of any disabilities they may have that could potentially hamper their ability to view our content.
Accessibility Tips
There are several things that you can do to optimize the accessibility of your web pages including:
- Ensuring all uploaded images are properly tagged with “alt tags” – alternative text that screen readers read to their users that describe the image displayed on the page. If you are stuck on what to write, Penn State has a great guide to crafting alt tags.
- Using Headings in proper order- screen readers use headings to identify levels of importance of content on a page, using them out of order can cause users to miss important content on your pages.
- Where possible, convert .pdf content to actual web pages- while .pdfs are the best format for files to download from the web, if the content contained within them is brief, it’s better to convert it to a web page to make the content more accessible. This also helps with SEO- more pages on your site equates to heavier “weight” as far as search engines are concerned, and makes it appear more relevant to them.
