Sample Web Page with Formatting

The School of Education needs to make sure that our website meets ADA accessibility standards, particularly with the upcoming April 24, 2026 deadline. 

Heading 3 Style: Let’s Talk about First Steps

Heading 4 Style: The easiest first step you can do is review your pages for the following formatting issues and update them:

1. Make sure that bullets or numbered lists are “real” lists, meaning that you used the bullet or numbered list feature in the editing toolbar, rather than making the bullets or typing the numbers yourself. Screen readers only recognize the real list types. This numbered list was made correctly using the numbered list option. The bulleted list below was made correctly using the bulleted list option.
2. Make sure that if you’re using headers that you’re using real header styles rather than just bolding regular text, AND that you’re using the header styles in the correct order. The first heading style used on the page must be Heading 3, the second must be Heading 4, and the third (rarely used) must be Heading 5. See the headings on this page for examples. Note that sometimes users bold these headers. This will not affect screen readers, which won’t notice, but may make it confusing for you to see which type of heading style it is.
3. Make sure that any hyperlinks to websites are linked from the text, and that the text provides a clear descriptor. If you leave a URL visible, screen readers will read out loud every letters and number. The graphic below illustrates what screen readers say.
4. Add alt text to any images on your pages. 

Heading 3 Style: Let’s Talk about the More Complicated Options

Heading 4 Style: The more complicated second step is to identify all the downloadable PDFs on your pages and decide how to proceed with them. Options include:

• Just make a list of them—include the link to the page and the name of the PDF if there’s more than one per page. This is a great first step if you can’t do more than this right now. The comms team can look at your list and help you decide how to proceed.
• If you see PDFs that don’t need to be on your site because they’re outdated, unnecessary, or contain the same information as what is already on the page, remove them.
• Replace PDFs with the source files they were made from, if practical. For example, upload a (read-only) Word file of your CV to replace a PDF. These files should also be set up in an accessible way but for the moment, replacing PDFs with these files as they are is a good short-term solution.
• If the content of the PDF is uncomplicated (not a lot of important graphics) and relatively short, put that content onto the web page itself. There are different ways to approach this and the comms team can help.

Heading 5 Style: This is the style almost no one uses but it’s an option if you need it. We may need to change this style eventually as italics may be hard to read for people with impaired vision.

Please note that Heading 5 Style cannot be nested directly under Heading 3 style. It has to be under a Heading Level 4.

That’s a quick overview of ways that you can make a big difference in the accessibility of your web pages! Thank you.