18
institutional websites
CASE STUDY
How the University of Ottawa turned accessibility into a strategic advantage
By unifying accessibility, quality, and SEO across its bilingual digital ecosystem, uOttawa improved governance, accelerated decision-making, and brought its 90% accessibility goal within reach.
21 million
annual visitors
55 million
annual page views
The problem
The University of Ottawa manages one of the most complex digital ecosystems in Canadian higher education. Its 18 institutional websites serve more than 21 million annual visitors and generate 55 million page views. As a bilingual university, every digital experience must also work seamlessly in both French and English.
A few years ago, the university’s accessibility score stood at 73%, below its internal goal of 90% and the higher education benchmark of 83.5%. Hundreds of contributors across faculties and services worked independently, using different structures, standards, and tools.
This decentralized approach made it difficult to maintain consistent accessibility, content quality, and SEO across the institution. As Nathalie Blanchard, Manager of Digital Marketing, explained, "At that scale, you don’t fix pages, you fix patterns."
Her team needed a way to unify standards and govern a large bilingual digital estate without centralizing control or slowing down distributed editors.
Accessibility is not about avoiding a fine. It’s about that one human who needs and has the right to access your content.
Nathalie Blanchard
Manager of Digital Marketing
The solve
In early 2026, uOttawa began treating accessibility as a core quality standard rather than a compliance checkbox. Accessibility moved upstream into the university’s design systems, shared components, content models, and editorial workflows.
Siteimprove gave the university a single institutional view of accessibility, quality, and SEO across all its websites. Distributed editors received real-time, actionable feedback, while central teams maintained visibility and governance without micromanaging their work.
Bilingual mapping allowed the team to monitor English, French, and combined website views with equal rigor. Policies, dashboards, and automated checks replaced manual, ad hoc processes, creating a repeatable approach that could scale across the institution’s 120 active site managers.
As expectations for digital performance increased, Siteimprove's DCI and AI capabilities also helped the team work faster. Tasks such as diagnosing issues, analyzing content performance, and preparing reports were reduced from hours to minutes.
During strategic meetings, the team could query Siteimprove's AI agent in real time, explore different scenarios, and ground decisions in current website data. This helped uOttawa move from reactive problem-solving to proactive, data-driven governance without adding headcount.
The university's accessibility work also improved content clarity and usability. By simplifying language, clarifying page structures, and enforcing proper hierarchy, uOttawa created content that is easier for people to navigate and easier for search engines and AI systems to interpret.
The results
73% → 88.5%
accessibility score increase
Hours → minutes
for analysis and reporting tasks
120
active site managers supported
Discover the Siteimprove effect
Discover how a two‑person team
raised Denver’s accessibility score and DCI
while scaling governance.
