110,000 +
students and faculty served
CASE STUDY
From compliance crisis to digital excellence
When Indiana University discovered 17,000+ accessibility violations across their sprawling digital ecosystem, what started as a compliance crisis became the catalyst for transforming how a Big Ten university manages content, search visibility, and digital governance at scale.
2,667
websites managed
7
campuses coordinated
The problem
Before 2019, the digital presence at Indiana University (IU) was a mess nobody could see.
Across seven campuses and nine medical education centers, more than 2,000 websites operated independently. Fifteen different content management systems. No central inventory. No governance. Some sites hadn’t been touched in over a decade.
"We had no single list of all IU websites," explains the team. When you can’t see what you have, you can’t manage it. Traffic lagged behind other Big Ten schools. SEO suffered from domain sprawl, and duplicate course listings were scattered across campus domains. Leadership asked for reports that the team couldn’t produce.
By 2019, fourteen university units were sharing limited Siteimprove access, but that didn’t provide the visibility or capabilities a university of IU’s scale needed.
In 2021, IU upgraded to enterprise Siteimprove access. The full platform scan revealed the actual scope of their digital landscape. Not 2,000 websites but 2,667. And buried across those sites: 17,000+ accessibility issues and 200,000+ broken links.
Suddenly, this wasn’t a theoretical problem. When you discover accessibility violations, the Department of Justice ( DOJ ) expects immediate action. The clock was ticking.
In response, University IT Services partnered with University Communications & Marketing in 2022 on a comprehensive digital strategy initiative. After a listening tour with stakeholders, they identified common goals and realized something critical: Accessibility couldn’t be separated from their other digital challenges. It had to be the foundation.
The entire strategy pivoted. Accessibility came first.
These results are outstanding and demonstrate the impact of our strategy, which is driven by effective collaboration!
Nancy Paton
VP for Communications & Marketing
The solve
IU launched an 18-month accessibility remediation project, knowing that fixing compliance issues would force them to solve deeper problems with governance, ownership, and site quality.
First, the team prioritized sites by impact. Prospective student touchpoints came first. They mapped ownership and created a comprehensive website inventory that had never existed before.
Next came the compliance process itself. IU established WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the standard and set remediation deadlines: 30-, 60-, 90-, 120-, and 180-day tracks based on DOJ complaint response expectations. No wiggle room.
Then, the team communicated requirements through batch emails to site stewards using Siteimprove's platform. Custom dashboards let them monitor progress daily and weekly. Site owners knew exactly where to make changes and how to get support.
This is where it could have fallen apart. IU's digital ecosystem is decentralized by design. Hundreds of site stewards across seven campuses, each with different priorities and resources.
The team launched monthly Web Community of Practice meetings. With around 700 members and 100 regular attendees, these sessions kept the momentum going. VPs across campuses engaged directly with Siteimprove dashboards showing their units' progress. Regular reminders emphasized that this was everyone’s responsibility.
"We've been using the User Flows section on Siteimprove for this a lot," says Emily Kumar, IU’s search strategist. "Seeing the path of where somebody's coming from: Are they coming from [a] search, are they coming from social? What page are they getting to? And then tracking how they get to that conversion. That’s been really helpful."
Meanwhile, the central team improved documentation, guidance, and proactive accessibility support in IU’s core web frameworks. They weren’t just telling people what to fix; they were making it easier to do the work.
Siteimprove's enterprise capabilities handled what manual processes never could. Comprehensive scanning across all 2,600+ sites gave IU complete visibility. The accessibility module identified specific issues with actionable solutions. Continuous crawling provided benchmarking and reporting that leadership wanted to see.
The web policy and inventory features established governance. Content quality tools surfaced problems beyond accessibility. And the access management system let IU create distinct roles and permissions for distributed teams while maintaining central oversight.
The results
67%
reduction in accessibility issues
53%
improvement in organic search traffic
12%
reduction in total websites through consolidation