This memo outlines a plan to begin removing out-of-date and inaccessible content from our digital platforms, to be led by University Relations (UR) and Information Systems & Technology (IST) while engaging campus communicators along the way.
This clean-up pertains to public-facing digital content (e.g. public webpages on uwaterloo.ca, social media accounts). A process for internal sites or academic learning platforms (e.g. LEARN, Portal) is currently under assessment in partnership with the Accessible Teaching, CTE and TII teams.
There are two major factors driving this initiative to clean-up digital content:
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Accessibility: we continue to advance the university’s Digital Accessibility initiative – to date, we have made great strides (with a positive compliance with AODA as of Dec 31, 2024). That said, much more work is needed. Specifically, we currently have a staggering 30,000 PDFs (many of which are inaccessible) on the University of Waterloo’s website. This clean-up is helping to serve the overarching goal for digital accessibility – “to promote a culture where all digital content is designed with accessibility in mind, up front.” Cleaning up inaccessible PDFs will help us deliver against this goal.
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Usability: the Functional Review report described our digital footprint as “proliferated”, with 750,000+ individual pages1, 3,000+ WCMS content publishers and over 200+2 social media accounts, all of this resulting in a “poor user experience”. In short, we need to reduce content while developing stronger governance practices relating to roles, responsibilities and processes for managing the university’s digital presence. In addition to this, recent research (conducted by Academia via MUR) highlighting that prospective students find our website “difficult to navigate.” Reducing content will help us move toward more curated and usable web content for our key audiences.
With these 2 driving factors in mind, UR and IST is kicking off an assessment of websites/pages (WCMS) and social media accounts. To be clear, we will not delete any content without engagement with content owners/web leads/social media leads across campus.
Accessibility clean-up is underway after close consultation with the Digital Accessibility steering committee, Digital Accessibility Community of Practice leads as well as the Campus Accessibility office. We are currently in the process of grouping the 30,000 PDFs to help organize clean-up efforts. UR will also provide PDF removal and re-linking support through extra co-op hires – with the goal of starting the actual document removal in September 2025.
This update is intended to be a “heads-up” that this work is coming. We commit to developing a process that is clear and transparent and collaborative. Collaboration is key: we are asking for anyone who oversees digital content (primarily web and social) to begin to think through your own content and identify candidate pages or social accounts for potential removal or consolidation.
If you want to engage
If you are interested in being part of this initiative and would like to help inform our protocol and future governance, please reach out to UR (Nem Rađenović) and IST (Mike Gašpić).