On Friday, the University of Wisconsin Badgers kicked off the COVID-19-influenced 2020 football campaign with a resounding 45-7 victory over the Illinois Fighting Illini. Like much in this year of change, Camp Randall was empty of the typical 80,000 fans.
To bring some of the gameday experience into the home, Wisconsin social media touted a new Badgers Live gameday experience. Unfortunately, what Wisconsin Athletics clearly failed to do was ensure this experience was open to all fans. Instead, they hung out a sign to people who use keyboards and screen readers saying, “You are not welcome.”
Anyone familiar with web accessibility will recognize obvious WCAG failures on the opening signup screen. Missing form labels and lack of keyboard access to needed controls just to name a couple.
If you manage to get past that, the signup experience has another basic failure where you are asked to pick an image to represent your user account. The images are not reachable from the keyboard and are missing proper alt text.
There are likely many other failures beyond this. I gave up after the inability to pick an image in the account creation process.
Web accessibility is not new and in fact is not optional for public institutions such as the University of Wisconsin. The university has detailed accessibility policies at https://www.wisc.edu/accessibility/.
At this point in my mind there is no reason beyond institutional indifference from at minimum the Athletics department to accessibility for these situations to keep happening. This is not the first time I have experienced accessibility issues with web offerings from the athletics department.
It is far beyond time that Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez and Chancellor Becky Blank take accessibility of the online experiences for Wisconsin Athletics seriously. This new gameday experience may be exciting or it may be of absolutely no interest to me. But I, like any other fan, should have the opportunity to join and evaluate for myself.
As of Sunday, inquiries to Chancellor Blank on Twitter have gone unacknowledged. Email to a member of the athletic department indicated the issue would be investigated but with no date for an answer.
We are in unique times with all of us facing many challenges that were unexpected at the start of the year. But it is important that as we respond to those challenges, as Wisconsin Athletics has here, we keep our values and responsibilities in mind. Clearly someone at the university had the time to find this service. In fact, pregame radio interviews with members of the athletic marketing department repeatedly promoted how the team was looking to respond to COVID-19 and still create quality experiences for players and fans. This should have included accessibility and failing to do so is simply unacceptable.
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