Equal Access & Opportunity

Accessibility

Providing an environment that promotes equal access, opportunity and inclusion is crucial to our mission and commitment to promote responsible leadership for service to the world.

Lenoir-Rhyne University is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We continue to make changes to improve the user experience for everyone and apply the relevant accessibility standards.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA and Level AAA.

Wherever possible, Lenoir-Rhyne University will aim to adhere to level AA of the *WCAG 2.1 guidelines, which states that sites should be:

  • Perceivable - Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.
  • Operable - User interface components and navigation must be operable.
  • Understandable - Information and the operation of user interface must be understandable.
  • Robust - Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including assistive technologies.

In order to ensure accessibility:

  • We use a variety of paid and free tools to ensure accessibility compliance.
  • Have internal departmental policies that take accessibility into account.
  • Incorporate accessibility into our procurement practices.
  • Provide our digital staff who manage our website with continual accessibility training and we work regularly to educate content owners and content authors about accessibility guidelines.
  • We confirm to formal accessibility quality assurance methods.

As part of our efforts to achieve WCAG 2.1 AA compliance, we use DubBot as an ongoing monitoring service. DubBot provides regularly scheduled, automated checks as well as on-demand checks against WCAG 2.1 Level A and Level AA criteria.

*Please note: Lenoir-Rhyne is currently striving to meet WCAG 2.2 guidelines in new website development projects.

Reporting Accessibility Issues

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of the Lenoir-Rhyne University website. If you have experienced any accessibility barriers while using any part of lr.edu, please let us know by sending an email with a description of the issue to Doug Minor, associate vice president for marketing and communications, at doug.minor@lr.edu.

Website Accessibility Features

The Lenoir-Rhyne website includes the following accessibility features:

  • Option to skip to main content
  • Pages are navigable using keyboard controls
  • Properly structured page headers
  • Option to enlarge type using standard keyboard controls
  • Alternative text descriptions for images
  • Captioned videos
  • Appropriate color contrast for page headers, text and navigational items

Accessibility Training & Publishing Workflow

A large majority of Lenoir-Rhyne webpage edits go through a content management system publishing workflow review to catch accessibility issues before they are published to the live website. Issues that are found are remediated and follow-up training is provided to web content authors.