Web Accessibility
William & Mary is working to enhance our digital accessibility standards and requirements to meet or exceed new federal regulations that make accessible the services, programs and activities offered by the university through web and mobile applications. Significant Cascade updates began in January 2025 to help improve the accessibility of your content to meet the compliance deadline of April 2026.
Digital Accessibility Resources at William & Mary
At the click of a mouse, the world is at your fingertips — that is, if you can use a mouse and see the screen and hear the audio. In other words, if you don’t have a disability of any kind. Each of the major categories of disabilities (visual, hearing, motor, cognitive) requires specific adaptations in web content design. William & Mary is committed to fostering inclusive digital environments usable and accessible to everyone.
W&M's digital accessibility website serves as an ongoing resource for the campus community, offering guidance, tools and best practices to help ensure digital content meets accessibility standards and reflects our values. Most accessibility principles can be implemented easily and will not impact your site’s overall look and feel.
Digital Accessibility Website & Resource Guide
Use the Digital Accessibility Resource Guide
The Digital Accessibility Resource Guide is a practical companion to William & Mary’s accessibility efforts, designed to support faculty, staff and content creators in building inclusive digital experiences. It includes step-by-step instructions, tools, and checklists to help you create and maintain accessible content across websites, documents, and digital communications.
- Make Accessible Documents & Captions
- Ways to Make Your Site Accessible
- Automated Tools & Manual Testing
What Cascade Does for You
University Web & Design handles most web accessibility centrally in our page templates and implement the following:
- Our design uses a color contrast checker to verify accessibility for our fonts, etc.
- We require alt text on images.
- We use CSS instead of decorative images in our web design.
- We added WAI-ARIA Landmark roles to our page templates (W3C recommended, these provide assistive technologies navigation advantages).
- Cascade includes a basic accessibility check on page submission
Don’t Ignore the Accessibility Checker
When you submit edits, Cascade’s built-in content checker includes a report of basic accessibility issues. During this step, be sure to review and address any flagged items.
Follow Cascade Guidance
Many of the guidelines in the Cascade Writing & Style Guide naturally support digital accessibility by promoting clarity, consistency, and user-friendly content. When followed, these best practices help make our websites more inclusive for all users. Together with the Cascade help pages, these resources offer additional guidance to ensure your content meets both style and accessibility standards.