Universal Web Site Accessibility

Background and Reason for the Policy: The University of Connecticut is committed to improving accessibility of its official Web sites to individuals with disabilities, in accordance with the State of Connecticut's Universal Web Site Accessibility Policy for State Web Sites - Version 4.0.

Purpose of Policy: The purpose of this policy is to insure that all students and employees, including those with hearing, visual or other disabilities, have access to all official information and services that are provided via the web.

Expected Institutional Outcome: Compliance with this policy will benefit not only individuals with disabilities, but will also provide an additional benefit to those users who require keyboard access or use text-based browsers, low-end processors, slow modem connections and/or no multi-media capabilities on their computer.

Applicability of Policy: This policy applies to all developers of University of Connecticut web pages.

Policy Statement:   It is the responsibility of Web page developers at the University to become familiar with the guidelines for achieving universal accessibility and to apply these principles in designing and creating any official University of Connecticut Web site. (Note: Official University of Connecticut Web pages are those that have been created by the University, its campuses, colleges, schools, departments or other administrative unit, for University business. Official Web pages do not include, among others, personal Web pages created by individual faculty, staff, students or student organizations.)

New Official Web pages and current Official Web pages that have been modified so that they do not meet the State's accessibility guidelines will not be allowed to link from the main UConn web pages, including the site index and site map.

The Chief Information Officer has overall responsibility for this policy.

The University's webmanager in the Office of University Communications is responsible for approving all links to the main University website based upon the linked site's adherence to this policy.

Review of this policy will occur biennially.

Last updated: June 1, 2005