The Libraries’ Lauren Murillo is a Student Accessibility Champion

If you are visually impaired, the Libraries’ website used to be more difficult to use. In fact, the site had almost 375,000 accessibility errors on it.

Some 363,573 fixed errors later, Libraries student worker Lauren Murillo has been named one of two 2020 Student Accessibility Champions at NC State by the IT Accessibility Office. The 97% reduction in errors by the College of Engineering rising senior earned her the honor as part of 2020 Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Over a third of a million repairs might seem like a staggering number, but chances are good that you won’t notice a single one of Murillo’s fixes. However if you are blind or have low vision, and use a screen reader to navigate the site, her work will be a revelation.

“Before I did this work, if a screen reader had gone through our site, it would have been a jumbled mess. All the words would be jumbled together,” Murillo says. “It wouldn’t give someone an idea of how the website is set up or how to use it, where to click or how to navigate somewhere.”

Using a diagnostic tool that scans an entire site and provides a listing of accessibility errors, Murillo worked with her team to develop an organized approach to address menu labels, missing alternative text, empty links, and uninformative page titles. 

Screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA, or VoiceOver are programs that either talk or provide Braille to a visually impaired user. The program reads the names of menus and buttons aloud, tells a user what images are on the page, and helps them navigate the page layout. But screen readers only know what to read, and in what order to read it, if the page is coded correctly. 

Overwhelming, websites are lacking from an accessibility standpoint. But the Libraries’ User Experience department is changing that, and Murillo’s work is a part of that group’s effort.

“At our User Experience retreat last year, the team listed every priority and then ranked them in order of importance—accessibility was a unanimous first,” says Application Developer and team member Erik Olson. “We also wanted to define the needs of users with vision, cognitive, or mobility issues not as users with accessibility needs, but as users. There are no special needs, just user needs."

“The user experience improvements that we've made specifically for users who are disabled and/or neurodivergent are actually user experience improvements that benefit all users,” adds User Experience Librarian Robin Davis. “Lauren's work has had a big impact: she has immediately enhanced the user experience for the hundreds of thousands of people who use the Libraries website every year.”

“A lot of web developers don't think about accessibility beyond the fact that it’s a requirement so they have to have it,” Murillo says. “If everybody had that mindset, no website would ever be able to accommodate users with disabilities. So I think it’s awesome that a larger number of people can use our site now, regardless of their ability.”