During my time as the Web Developer Intern for IUPUI, I worked as the main accessibility researcher for the team. I spent a lot of time researching WCAG 2.0 and attending conferences to learn about this topic and apply what I learned to our current practices as developers and designers.
I applied what I learned and worked to develop a plan of action to combat all of our inaccessible PDF’s we had on some of our websites. Our plan was to take each PDF and review it to see if it could be made into a webpage. This was the plan for those PDF’s that were shorter in content. For one of our websites, we were able to take over 50 PDF’s and turn them into a section of the website that allowed students to easily see different majors and learn more about them without having to download each individual PDF (see these pages here).
Making these PDF’s as a webpage helped our visually impaired students as well as students in general. Through research, we found that having to download PDF’s for each topic created a negative user experience for our students.
Learning about WCAG 2.0 and getting involved in a community that actively works to create a better experience for ALL has really helped me as a designer. I’m excited to be able to bring this knowledge to the table in my future endeavors.
SARAH AKE 