Your college website could get you sued.

About the event

Your university website is the backbone of most schools. It’s where students sign up for classes, submit homework, and manage their registration. But if those critical functions are inaccessible, you’re not just failing to meet the needs of your students—you’re opening yourself up to legal liability. Join us as we talk about 5 real-life college website lawsuits from the last two years. What went wrong, what they could do to fix it, and most importantly for you, how shockingly common those same issues are on many college websites.

Don’t Learn These Lessons the Hard Way

35% of college PDFs share the accessibility issue that went to trial.

Most accessibility suits settle quietly. This one didn't: a community college fought it all the way to trial, lost on 14 separate ADA violations, and had a six-figure award reinstated on appeal, with years of legal fees stacked on top. The PDFs at the centre of it were ordinary course materials: untitled, untagged, published the way almost everyone publishes them.

59% of higher-ed sites share a failure linked to class-action lawsuits.

Universities have faced class actions claiming their websites couldn't be used at all without a mouse. Tab through most college sites and you'll see why: the focus indicator disappears, so a keyboard user is navigating blind, guessing where the cursor landed. Someone trying to register for classes has no way to tell which button they're about to press.

$100,000+ The form problem that cost one institution a six-figure settlement

An institution got sued because applicants couldn't complete the forms at the centre of its own admissions process. Unlabelled fields, contrast too low to read the borders, controls that a keyboard can't reach — each one small, all of them together a wall. The people who hit that wall weren't browsing. They were trying to apply.

Format

• 11:00 The five cases, and how common each mistake is right now
• 11:45 The one that got dismissed
• 11:50 Q&A. Bring the page you're worried about.

It is challenging to keep track of everything under our university's web domain. The web umbrella contains tens of thousands of pages, certainly over 100,000 web pages. Silktide gives us a central location where we can keep an eye on what's going on the web.

Christy Grant, The University of Texas at Dallas