Purdue University Policy

Purdue University's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is responsible for overseeing and enforcing the University’s Electronic Information, Communication and Technology Standard (S-5), as well as compliance with the 2026 Updated Department of Justice digital content accessibility standards (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA). Digital accessibility is everyone's responsibility.

For more information, go to the OCR webpage on Digital Accessibility.

Importance

To design for accessibility means to be inclusive to the needs of your users. This includes your main users, users outside of your target demographic, users with disabilities, and even users from different cultures and countries.

Benefits

Any accessibility improvement benefits all website users, not only those with impairments. For example:

• Structuring content using clearly-marked headings.
• Organizing data in tables using captions and column/row headers.
• Large, clickable elements benefit users on all devices.
• Increasing contrast between text and background colors will improve readability.
• Using text instead of images of text will decrease page load times.
• Utilizing captions and transcripts makes audio and video content useful in noisy environments, for people with learning disabilities, and for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

The covered topics are:

• Text: headings, lists, and tables.
• Controls: links, buttons and forms
• Color: color perception and color contrast.
• Images: when to use alternative text, what to do with complex images, and image captions.
• Documents: how to make these files accessible.
  • Microsoft Office Word
  • Microsoft Office PowerPoint
  • Adobe Acrobat PDF
• Video & audio: transcripts, captions and/or subtitles are required.

Additional web accessibility resources and articles.