30,000+
students
CASE STUDY
Building Australia’s most accessible university: How CQUniversity turned ambition into action
CQUniversity used Siteimprove to scale accessibility across more than 4,000 webpages and achieve WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliance.
3,000
administrative staff
4,000+
webpages
The problem
CQUniversity Australia has always believed education should be accessible to everyone. As Australia’s largest regional university, serving learners across metropolitan, regional, and remote communities, it wanted its digital experience to reflect the same commitment to equity and opportunity that defines its classrooms.
That ambition led to a bold goal: becoming Australia’s most accessible university.
However, the university first needed a reliable understanding of its current accessibility performance. More than 4,000 webpages were managed by distributed content owners across a large and complex digital ecosystem. Although accessibility was already a shared institutional value, the web team lacked a consistent benchmark against WCAG 2.2 Level AA and the specialist guidance needed to prioritize remediation.
The challenge was both technical and organizational. CQUniversity needed to align its people, processes, expertise, and technology so accessibility improvements could scale across the institution rather than depend on isolated fixes or individual teams.
When a student can independently complete an enrollment, access course materials, or apply for support without encountering unnecessary barriers, that’s when we know this work matters.
Gabby Rothery
Senior Digital Officer
The solve
CQUniversity began by working with the Centre for Accessibility to complete a comprehensive audit. The audit established the university’s first benchmark against WCAG 2.2 Level AA and provided a clear roadmap for improvement.
With its priorities defined, CQUniversity used Siteimprove to turn that strategy into action. Rather than reviewing and repairing webpages individually, the team could identify recurring accessibility barriers, prioritize improvements across thousands of pages, and monitor progress from a single institutional view.
Siteimprove Accessibility enabled the university to systematically identify, prioritize, and track WCAG 2.2 issues across its digital estate. Automated testing, governance tools, and AI-powered insights helped incorporate accessibility into everyday publishing while giving central teams visibility across distributed content operations.
Siteimprove's Digital Certainty Index provided an organization-wide measure of digital quality throughout the remediation program. PDF Remediation extended accessibility improvements beyond webpages to downloadable documents used by students, while Content Quality helped the university maintain clear, plain-language content for its diverse and geographically dispersed community.
Technology was only part of the transformation. CQUniversity also provided accessibility training to approximately 120 staff members and strengthened collaboration with its Accessibility & Equity team. This helped embed accessibility practices into future digital projects rather than treating remediation as a one-time compliance exercise.
The results
WCAG 2.2 Level AA
achieved across the university’s websites
400+
webpages manually remediated
120
staff members trained in accessibility
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