With new federal regulations for web accessibility coming down the pike, officials from Perkins School for the Blind embarked on an experiment. They examined popular website pages — admissions, events, dining, etc. — of 20 top colleges to gauge their accessibility. The result: More than 90 percent didn’t meet guidelines to make websites accessible to disabled users. So a division of the nearly 190-year-old nonprofit school that develops and sells products — called Perkins Solutions, it’s the primary provider of Braille typewriters — launched Perkins Access last week to help colleges perfect their websites and learning platforms. Customers such as Harvard and Notre Dame had already sought their expertise; the former, for its online classes, and the latter, for its admissions portal. “Everybody should be accessible because it’s the right thing to do,” said Bill Oates, vice president of Perkins Solutions. Not to mention, he added, it widens colleges’ pool of potential students, and could head off litigation issues like those that hit Florida State, Penn State and others. “We believe that this is an imminently solvable problem for higher education.”
Read more: Closer look at colleges’ online accessibility – POLITICO