When one of our clients went through an OCR review for website accessibility, we saw it as an opportunity to get feedback directly from the horse’s mouth—and make our website platform even better. Here’s what we learned from talking to the Office of Civil Rights about website accessibility.
Thank you to everyone who attended our session at last week’s NYCDOE Beyond Access Forum. And most especially, a huge thank you to the eChalk users from PS 97Q, PS 10R and IS 254X who joined us to speak at our session: “How I Got an Accessible Website Without Lifting a Finger.” If you missed the Forum, you can check out some of these great clips.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented degree of confusion, uncertainty and anxiety for students, parents and teachers this year. A comprehensive, well-organized class webpage can help keep everyone on track in the COVID era. We’ve created an example class page and some helpful tips to get you started.
At the beginning of July 2020, PS/MS 146Q (The Howard Beach School) had more than 600 web accessibility warnings on the school website. After less than an hour of work by school staff during a short call, the eChalk team helped them get down to fewer than 30 errors and alerts across their entire site—using eChalk GUIDE to identify and fix accessibility issues.
Your school website should play a central role in any school emergency communication plan—including your plan for COVID-19. The school website is the first place parents go to check for updates on school closures, safety plans and policy changes. We’ve put together a simple checklist and a sample page with some ideas on what you might want to include on your COVID-19 webpage.
Congratulations to our NYC eChalk schools for meeting their website accessibility goals! As of the July 2020 deadline, 97% of New York City schools using eChalk met the NYC DOE interim goal for website accessibility, achieving a “5” or “4” (the highest grades on a 1-5 scale) on the DOE’s website accessibility scorecard.