UX research
County Websites Accessibility Audit
A WCAG audit of 159 public county extension websites for UGA's College of Agriculture, transforming human barriers into a fixable, template-level roadmap.
Public county websites are how Georgians reach real services, like 4-H programs, agriculture resources, local events. If the site excludes people with disabilities, the service does too.
As an intern in the College of Agriculture (CAES) communications department, I audited all 159 county extension websites to identify the accessibility failures preventing residents from reaching information and services and to give the team a clear plan to fix them.
What I audited
I evaluated each site against five accessibility dimensions, logging specific, reproducible issues rather than generic scores:
- Headers & page structure — the semantic scaffolding screen readers rely on to navigate.
- Image alt text — whether photos, flyers, and logos convey meaning to non-visual users.
- Link & button text — whether controls make sense out of context.
- Colour contrast — whether text and form cues are legible to low-vision users.
- PDF & document accessibility — whether newsletters and pamphlets are tagged for screen readers.
What I found
The failures were recurring, template-level issues repeated across most sites. That was the key insight: a shared template meant a handful of root fixes could lift every county at once.
Share of all logged accessibility issues across the 159 sites.
Two counties, in detail
To make the patterns concrete for the team, I documented representative sites — showing both the failures and what a fix looks like.
Atkinson County
- 4-H summer camp images carried non-descriptive alt text.
- Non-descriptive links across 4-H activities, judging teams, and summer camp pages.
- The ANR page shipped with unconfigured components.
DeKalb County
- Recommended alt text for a pollinator-census photo: "A person with long, wavy hair observing and taking notes on a clipboard in a garden filled with blooming pink flowers."
- Low contrast in the required-field asterisks of the "subscribe to our mailing list" section.
Strategic recommendations
Because the problems were structural, the fixes had to be too. I delivered three, ordered by leverage.
1 Fix the template
The recurring contrast and resolution issues live in the shared template. Correcting them there resolves the same problem across all 159 sites at once.
2 Train the people uploading content
Equip photographers and editors to add alt text as they upload media, so accessibility becomes part of the workflow rather than a cleanup task.
3 Test with real users
Once fixes ship, have a user with visual or auditory impairments navigate the sites to catch what an automated pass and a checklist miss.
A missing alt attribute, a vague link, an unlabelled field can be the difference between a resident reaching a service and being quietly turned away.
From the audit's framingReflection
This audit sharpened how I think about research: it's easy to design for an "average" user, but the real work is finding the points of exclusion.
It's also why accessibility is now a default in everything I build, this portfolio included, rather than a final-stage checklist.