Higher Ed in 4k Project
An accessibility analysis of up to 100 web pages from every college and university in the United States (nearly 4,000 higher education institutions).
The baseline set of results was obtained and analyzed in November 2019. A follow-up analysis of the same web pages was conducted in November 2020. In November of 2023, we revisited the project.
The 4k project considers the automatically detectable errors that can be identified by WAVE.
Introduction
There are two main purposes for the 4k Project:
- To document the progress of United States higher education institutions’ efforts to improve web accessibility.
- To encourage and empower higher education groups to improve their accessibility.
Interpreting the results
All automated tools, including WAVE, have limitations—only about a third of possible conformance failures can be automatically detected. The absence of detectable errors does not indicate that a site is accessible or compliant.
Still, the data presented in this project provides a meaningful representation of the state of web accessibility in Higher Ed.
“Errors” are WAVE-detected, accessibility barriers that have notable end-user impact and are likely WCAG 2 Level A/AA conformance failures.