As public-facing divisions of the university, colleges, schools, departments, and academic units must ensure conformance with the information and communication technology (ICT) policies covered in the NSHE ICT and the UNLV ICT. In addition, UNLV's Top Tier 2.0 vision embraces and focuses on, among various areas: social justice, equity, and inclusion. All three ideas pertain to this issue of digital accessibility, regardless of one's abilities.
For more information about accessibility for colleges and schools, email Accessibility Resources Team Support.
Web Accessibility
It is beneficial for all university entities to work with UNLV Web & Digital Strategy to create and maintain their web presence. This partnership helps ensure accessibility in site design, look, structure, pages, and included attachments and media. UNLV Web & Digital Strategy team members have all been trained on accessibility principles and topics, so when a unit's website is run by UNLV, procurement vetting, ongoing paperwork, and review are not required.
Third Party Websites
If a department or unit hosts its web server and has projects created and maintained by a third party, the obligations or requirements for accessibility are not reduced. Because third-party web vendors are vetted for accessibility standards conformance and compliance by the Office of Accessibility Resources, units and colleges should be prepared for the initial and ongoing review process required.
Accessible Deliverables from Vendors
UNLV strives to be an inclusive environment. UNLV's vendors must create and provide contract deliverables that are digitally accessible and that conform to the expected Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and Section 508 standards. You don't have to know there's an individual with a disability; you do have to create content as if there is a person with a disability.
At UNLV, every internal and external website (including course sites) and any documents provided (such as but not limited to: PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Word DOCX files, forms, etc.) are required to be digitally accessible. UNLV Web and Digital Strategy is only able to post accessible versions of PDFs and other digital documents. Content must be created with accessibility in mind and cannot be reliant on overlay technologies or "accessibility widgets" as these often interfere with the screen reader technology used by persons with disabilities.
All multimedia resources available to the general public and to UNLV's internal community must be appropriately captioned (i.e. human-correction and oversight are applied, not merely auto-generated). Text in the captioned media must be synchronized with a speaker's dialogue and include additional auditory information such as sound effects.
For questions or for further information, please contact the Office of Accessibility Resources at accessibilityresourceteam@unlv.edu.
Web Accessibility Resources for Campus Units
Regardless of how your unit's website is hosted or maintained, the following are some UNLV-supported resources for addressing the accessibility of your public- and student-facing content.