29
May
2020
|
17:22 PM
Europe/Amsterdam

Meeting Ontario's web accessibility requirements

Meeting Ontario’s website accessibility requirements

To ensure the college is meeting Ontario’s AODA guidelines, all web site content must meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA standards as of January 1, 2021. PDF files posted on mohawkcollege.ca are considered web content and will need to be accessible by January 2021.

Mohawk’s Marketing team will be reaching out to areas with inaccessible PDF files to review ways to make the content accessible. Options include:

  • Remove the PDF from the website if it is no longer needed.
  • Convert the PDF content into web content (see benefits below).
  • Reformat the original document and/or PDF so that it meets accessibility standards, then repost the accessible PDF to the website.
  • Remediate the document through an external remediation service. Fees apply, please contact Marketing for details.

10 benefits of converting PDF files to web content:

  1. Web content is accessible to all users and meets AODA guidelines.
  2. Web content is better optimized for search engines.
  3. Web content is part of our website and provides seamless navigation, consistent branding, and opportunities to explore related content.
  4. Web visits and page views are tracked with Google Analytics, PDF views are not.
  5. Web content is ‘responsive’ and adapts to all devices, compared to PDFs which often requires users to pinch and zoom to read. (Mobile traffic now makes up more than half of all traffic on mohawkcollege.ca.)
  6. Faster download times.
  7. Additional software is not needed to view the content, such as Adobe Acrobat.
  8. It’s easier and faster to edit web content if necessary.
  9. PDFs can’t be updated after you've distributed them. Once a PDF has been viewed, downloaded, or shared, it can’t be changed. A web page can easily be kept up to date.
  10. Users can easily share web content via social media.

The review process will recommend the best way to provide PDF content, with the goal of reducing PDFs on the website to only those files which require PDF format. Examples include forms or document which must be printed.

Questions?