The assignment: making policies accessible, remediating links, and improving content on the billing and financial aid sections of a local college website. From translating a PDF into a web page, to rewriting confusing directions on how students pay tuition, to reorganizing a contact page that had become a link farm, I had to combine what I already knew with new research to meaningfully improve the site’s accessibility.

From a PDF to a Page

This college hosted many important policies on their website in the form of PDFs. Over time, new guidelines highlighted that this was becoming less accessible. The process of ensuring PDFs were up to date, had accessible text, and could be used with assistive technology made it clear that dynamic web pages would be more accessible. I was tasked with converting one of our longer, more complicated policies into the CMS to identify what would need to be adjusted before updating all of the institution’s PDFs.

In my testing and review process, I identified one of the biggest limitations of our current CMS: while we could set proper heading structure for easy navigation, the web theme did not support deep nesting of lists in its semantic HTML markup. A direct, one-to-one conversion of the PDF’s formatting was not possible; our approach needed to fit the system’s constraints while maintaining meaning and hierarchy. Through several rounds of review and collaboration, I worked with the team to move the accessibility improvement process forward. Using WAVE and a manual review, I confirmed the test policy was fully keyboard navigable. Policies like this one help students understand their rights, give faculty a clear framework to operate within, and keep the college in legal compliance, so making it genuinely accessible wasn’t just a formatting exercise, it meant that information was actually reaching everyone it needed to.

Clarifying Confusing Instructions

The billing section of the website at this college needed content updates due to confusing terms and language that had accumulated and grown outdated over time. I led the content update for this section, including identifying problems, working with the billing team, and using the CMS to design new layouts within the existing template. My focus was applying plain language principles: language that is direct, simple, and easy to understand for the audience of students and parents.

My initial review involved surface level improvements such as using simpler words, defining terms, and correcting punctuation. The fine tuning work involved organizing information by relevance, adding headers tied to specific topics, and using bullet points to reduce cognitive load and improve scannability. Further accessibility improvements included remediating links to ensure they worked properly and opened in the same window, and rewriting link text so it reflected its destination. By breaking the process down this way, I was able to reduce the number of pages users needed to navigate to find information and improve access for screen reader users. Improved accessibility here gave students clarity into who to contact, when payments were due, and how they should be paid, and made it easier for billing staff to direct students to the right resources. It also improved usability for mobile users.

150+ Links, One Fix

Buttons and links are a common opportunity for accessibility issues because they are easy to add to a website but require proper formatting to be usable by everyone. On this website, the program finder was used frequently to direct users to their program of choice. Across 3 separate program finders, this resulted in over 150 “learn more” links that were visually and programmatically identical. For a sighted mouse user, this wasn’t a problem since surrounding context made each link’s destination clear. But for a user navigating by keyboard or with a screen reader, a page full of identical “learn more” links meant no way to tell them apart or know where each one led.

The fix was to add visually hidden text to each link, specific descriptive text that isn’t visible on the page but is read by screen readers, giving each link a unique, meaningful name tied to its destination. Using WAVE, I validated that all 150+ links were now unique and properly labeled.

A Link Farm to Usable Contact Information

The last piece of this project brought all of it together: a joint contact page for financial aid and billing that had become genuinely difficult to use. Office hours were listed across in-person, virtual, and walk-in formats without a clear structure, making it hard to know when someone was actually available. Even more confusing was the contact search: users selected a topic first, and only then saw who to reach out to. Since many staff members handled multiple topics, the same person often appeared under several different listings, so finding the right contact meant guessing which topic they’d be filed under. What should have been a simple lookup had turned into a link farm of over 31 duplicate contact links.

I restructured the page from the ground up. Instead of organizing by topic, I reorganized it by department, listing each staff member once under their name and email, with the topics they handled listed clearly beneath. I also simplified the hours by replacing the dense paragraph format with a table, letting users scan across in-person, virtual, and walk-in hours at a glance instead of parsing through sentences to figure out when someone was available. The result took the page from 31 scattered, duplicate links to a single, organized, and genuinely usable resource.

Continuing to Face the Challenge

Accessibility work in practice is about exploring and understanding the constraints of your systems and providing updates. It’s a mix of technical constraints, content clarity, and small details, like a link’s name, that add up to real usability for people relying on assistive technology. Engaging with an internal team to execute fixes and stakeholders to understand their experience and perspective was an equally important part of the work. As a professional in this field, I look for ways to lean on the knowledge of others, research, and systemize improvements, improving accessibility and the overall usability of websites.