I guess I’ve been lucky; I picked up the standards/accessibilty bug of my own accord, and I’ve had good support from my boss and most of my internal clients.

Here’s what I see as the two biggest problems facing educational sites: fewer resources and distributed site development.

Colleges and universities, generally, have far smaller Web development staffs than your average corporation. Our school serves something on the order of 30,000 individuals (10k FTE, IIRC) every year, and I’m our Web staff, along with a part-time assistant: for design, development, maintenance, and strategy. So when you have a tiny staff trying to fill the needs of a large community, there often isn’t time to climb the learning curve of standards & accessibility. (The same is true to some extent for non-profits; before this, I worked for a local non-profit — the Web piece of my job was about 1/4.) That, and even when you have time to learn, it’s hard to find time to put that into practice, esp. at first when you’re converting big chunks of Web.

This factor combines with the very nature of the educational enterprise — in a lot of schools, many people are creating and maintaining Web sites, few of them with any depth of training. (It can be like the Wild West!) Some schools are turning to CMS’s to rein in their development and to provide a common foundation; unfortunately, it can be hard to find a CMS that provides standards & accessibility compliance out of the box.

One positive thing that I’ve noticed lately is that the University Web Developers list seems to be getting a lot more traffic from people looking to go the standards/accessibility/CSS route.

I wish I knew whether going to the more “modern” mode of development had saved us any bandwidth — we started going there several years ago (mid-2001), and I wasn’t keeping good stats reports then. I will say that it eases some tasks, more with sub-sites than the megalith which is the site’s core. (I was able to covert our school’s lit mag site to colors matching the new cover in about an hour…and that included picking the colors out of the cover that I wanted. The only bit that isn’t done is changing the tab borders.)

okay, so that was a long response…I suppose it’s something that’s been eating at my mind for a while.

(oh, nice site, too. I found you by way of the CSS Vault, and I’ll definitely be adding this to my aggregator.)

University of Florida