Accessibility
The University of Illinois System is committed to digital accessibility as a core value of equity and inclusion. By ensuring that our digital content is usable by people with disabilities, we remove barriers, support independence, and foster full participation in all aspects of university life. Together, we are building a more inclusive digital environment for our entire community.
Accessibility Resources for Faculty and Staff
University-Specific Resources
Disclaimer: The resources provided on this page are intended to support general accessibility best practices and are believed to be accurate at the time of publication. However, accessibility policies, tools, and contacts may vary by campus. Please refer to the resources for your specific university or department to ensure the most current and applicable information.
Accessibility Resources
General Accessibility Resources
Aira Visual Interpreter App
The university provides a system-wide license for Aira, a visual interpreting service that connects individuals who are blind or have low vision with trained professionals via secure video calls. By geofencing campus locations, Aira enables students, employees, and visitors to receive real-time visual support for navigating physical spaces, accessing printed materials, and participating fully in campus life.
ARIA Authoring Practices Guide
This guide offers practical design patterns and code examples to help developers create accessible web interfaces using ARIA. It provides detailed advice and examples beyond what would be appropriate to a technical specification, but which are important to understand the specification.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) ARIA Authoring Practices 1.2
This document details the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) standard for providing additional semantic information for various HTML elements, particularly when they may be used in an unintuitive manner. It is the formal documentation defining the use of ARIA.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
This is an internationally recognized standards guide developed by the W3C to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. WCAG provides guidance on making digital content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for all users.
Reporting and Evaluation Tools
The following three resources are automated browser extensions that evaluate a given webpage and list the potential issues that are able to be programmatically determined. As with all automated accessibility checkers, they cannot be fully comprehensive, but they're fantastic for checking your work. AInspector was developed by people at UIUC; aXe Developer Tools is developed by Deque, and WAVE is developed by WebAIM.
This W3C service functions similarly to the above extensions, except it runs as a standalone webpage that takes a URL as input.
The next two resources allow the user to view HTML structures that are pertinent to accessibility. Rather than automatically evaluating the page and enumerating the issues, they provide aid in more efficiently evaluating a page manually. ANDI is a single tool that provides detailed information on a variety of structures, while the Bookmarklets are a collection of individual utilities that each visually highlight specific HTML structures on the page.
Color Contrast
The following resources aid the user in checking the contrast of foreground and background elements to ensure adequate contrast for readability.
Color Contrast Analyzer (CCA)
The Color Contrast Analyzer is a desktop application that will take a foreground and background color and provide information on the level of WCAG compliance as well as its contrast ratio.
WebAIM Color Contrast Checker
The WebAIM Color Contrast Checker performs the same kind of function as the CCA above, but it is hosted on a webpage rather than as a desktop app.
Colorzilla
Colorzilla is an extension that allows the user to grab the hex codes of various colors on a webpage, among providing other color-related utilities. It does not include contrast checking.
Coloring for Colorblindness
This page provides an interactive space to play with colors and palettes while also considering how they would be perceived by colorblind viewers.
Assistive Technologies
One common assistive technology is the screen reader, which allows an unsighted user to perceive and interact with a computer or mobile device by only using the keyboard. JAWS and NVDA are both screen readers for Windows. MacOS and iOS have VoiceOver, and Android devices can use TalkBack.
JAWS for Windows
NVDA for Windows
VoiceOver for macOS
TalkBack for Android
Similar to the screen reader is a text-to-speech utility such as Kurzweil 3000. These will also read text content aloud to the user, but they tend to be less full-featured than a screen reader.
The reverse of the text-to-speech tool is a speech recognition utility. A tool such as Dragon Naturally Speaking allows the user to speak their text input rather than using they keyboard to type it.
Training & Tutorials
Explore certifications, programs, courses, and webinars to take your accessibility skills to the next level.
System-wide
Level Access Webinars
Deque Webinars
Urbana-Champaign
Information Accessibility Design and Policy (IADP) Online Professional Certificate Program
Chicago
Assistive Technology Certificate
Springfield
Digital Accessibility for Educators (DAE)