Website Accessibility

Xavier University is committed to providing an equitable, accessible digital environment and is actively working to achieve full compliance with digital accessibility standards ahead of the May 2027 federal regulatory deadline.

Institutional Standard: WCAG 2.1 Level AA

In alignment with federal civil rights regulations under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Xavier University is currently in the process of reaching full compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Conformance Level AA ahead of the May 2027 compliance milestone.

These standards ensure that all university digital environments accommodate assistive technologies, screen readers, keyboard navigation, screen magnifiers, and mobile devices.
Scope of Compliance

• Course Materials (Canvas): Syllabi, lecture slides, assignments, and digital readings used in active courses.
• University Web Pages: Departmental websites, public information pages, and university subdomains.
• Campus Documents & Media: Digital documents (Word, PDFs, presentations) and instructional/promotional media.
• Procured Software & Tools: Third-party educational platforms and enterprise administrative systems.

Ongoing Monitoring & Campus Support

• Automated Nightly Scans: Xavier uses Acquia Optimize to scan public web pages nightly to flag accessibility issues for continuous remediation.
• Canvas Course Tools: Faculty have access to built-in course accessibility evaluators within Canvas to identify and fix course document issues.
• Content Cleanup & Archiving: Departments are actively migrating internal-only files to authenticated Microsoft SharePoint sites and archiving inactive historical files per university records retention policies.