At Illinois, accessibility is one of our core values. We’re continuing to refine the accessibility of the underlying theme, and we also encourage content creators to become familiar with ways to make your content more accessible.

Known issues with the theme

Last updated: October 8, 2020

Issues we’ll address in v1.1

Header styles have contrast issues within the Media and Text block

If you use a header style within a Media and Text block, it will inherit the dark blue color used by headers in the body text area, which is hard to read against the dark blue box. We’ve identified this problem and will prioritize fixing it.

Default table styles have contrast issues

We’ve used WordPress’s defaults in many cases, and the default WordPress table style has a very light gray border which isn’t high enough contrast, and footers look identical to table data. As soon as we can, we’ll add this and other style overrides for improved accessibility.

Guidelines for content creators

Alt text and using the media library for image management

Using the media library is recommended for all image types: featured images, embedded images, and gallery images.

When you add an image to your media library, you can also add a standard set of alternative text for screen readers which will be included any time you place the picture on your site.

Alternative text (which isn’t displayed on the screen) is required for any image that contains information, though it’s not required for purely decorative images.

In addition, captions will be displayed on the screen if you choose to add them as well. Captions aren’t required the same way alternative text is, and they aren’t interchangeable with each other.

Captions explain the image’s context for the benefit of people who can see the image, and may include photo attribution.

Alternative text explains the image’s content for the benefit of people who can’t see the image, who may need different details about the information it contains (for example, how to navigate a pop-up window for software installation).

Got suggestions? Let us know

These sites are a volunteer effort by campus webmasters from several departments. If you’ve got suggestions or improvements, please let us know using our contact and feedback form.