Accessibility Scans and Institutional Activity: An Activity Theory Analysis

Once a month, I log into a website with my University of Texas (UT) elec tronic ID and look at an exhaustive series of graphs and statistics about the collection of websites for the Computer Writing and Research Laboratory (CWRL). It's not a small job: the cwrl.utexas.edu domain currently has tens of thousands of pages, with more being added daily. My job is to review the newest statistics on these pages, ensure that they comply with the university's Web accessi bility guidelines, and change the underlying code if they don't. These changes can sometimes be extensive, but they're all "under the hood": they don't involve chang ing the look of the site, just the way it interacts with adaptive technologies such as screen readers. If you haven't heard about Web accessibility, chances are that you will soon. Loosely speaking, Web accessibility is the ability for any user to read and understand a website with appropriate adaptive technology. If a user is visually impaired, for in stance, he or she should still be able to "read" the site by listening to a screen reader, 2l computer-generated voice that reads the page's text and provides appropriate feed back when the user makes changes. Users with impaired motor skills should still be able to navigate the site easily with just the keyboard, or just a pointing device. Similarly, hearing-impaired and cognitively impaired users should be accommodated. It is, as John Slatin and Sharron Rush point out, a civil rights issue: just as federal law requires curb cuts and ramps for wheelchairs, it requires accessible websites for en