How higher education can adapt to a changing digital landscape 

In our recent webinar, Adapting to the changing digital landscape in Higher Education, experts shared practical steps for improving the digital experience and boosting student recruitment

Joining the discussion were Kautav Bhattacharya, CTO, Jamie Stantonian, Experience Design & Research Director, Konnie Zarnaveli, Experience Designer and Accessibility Specialist from Inviqa, and Lars Sorensen, Accessibility Expert at Acquia.

This webinar builds on insights from our earlier roundtable, and our recent research report, Clearing 2025: A high-stakes digital battleground for UK universities.

While there’s no single trick to perfecting the digital experience, here are some key areas universities can focus on to make meaningful improvements.

Simplify content for student-friendly pages

Kaustav shared how his son is currently researching universities. Rather than reading dense course pages, he feeds the page URLs into Notebook LM to summarise the content. And he does the same with video captions where available.

What this highlights is that content needs to be succinct and website pages need to be structured so AI tools can interpret them effectively.

Use Alt tags strategically

Accessibility was discussed more widely, but the topic of Alt tags probably got the most attention. While important for digital accessibility, their use needs to be carefully considered – not every image needs a verbose description of what it represents. As Konnie says, “Alt tags either need to add meaning to screen reader users, or it should be empty alt text so it shouldn’t present as noise.”

Lars backed this up, saying “The first thing you want to ask yourself is: are we conveying some kind of important information in this image? If yes, then obviously you need to give it a text alternative describing what’s going on, or even better, what is the function of this image.”

So, if an image is just for decorative flair, it’s more helpful for those using screen readers if they’re tagged as decorative so they can be skipped.

While AI can speed up the process of creating Alt tags, human oversight is still needed to decide whether the tag is correct and necessary.

Want more about where to focus your accessibility attention? Check out Konnie’s blog post about the most common issues she came across while assessing university websites, why they’re important, and examples of universities getting it right.

Overcome internal barriers and get buy-in for transformation

While universities generally know what needs doing, they often face internal barriers to getting started. To address this, Kaustav suggests starting with stakeholders to identify key players and ongoing initiatives. From here, you can build a backlog of tasks to work through as you get stakeholder buy-in for the improvements.

Then, to get people excited about the initiatives, ideation workshops and prototypes can help people get a more tangible idea of what you’re trying to achieve and help get it across the line.

Finally, research – guerrilla or otherwise – will provide human data to validate that these initiatives are important or useful.

Get into a regular cadence for reviewing accessibility 

How often you should review your website’s accessibility largely depends on how often content changes. For things that you update regularly, you’ll want to monitor accessibility almost continuously, while for structural elements like menus and templates, these should be checked before going live and following a major update.

While automated testing shouldn’t be relied on solely, a tool like Acquia Web Governance can help highlight issues that need to be addressed – a quick scan can highlight issues on a newly published page, while weekly report keeps you on top of changes across the site.

The tool also identifies how critical the issue is and whether it impacts a large part of the website or occurs on a single page, allowing you to prioritise fixing the issues that affect key user journeys and have the biggest impact on improving the overall user experience. 

Interested to see how Acquia Web Governance can help you – click here to get your free scan.

Learn these lessons from retail

In terms of what universities can learn from online retail, Kaustav recommends making information easy to find.

This is something that online commerce excels at, and universities can copy by: 

• laying out course information more clearly – what it covers, who it’s for, costs, related courses, etc. 
• making core information accessible in as few clicks as possible
• providing personalised content based on browser behaviours like tailored guides, relevant related content, or event invitations

UGC (user-generated content) is another area where universities can take the lead from retail. While some universities have started to incorporate it onto the website, what we found in our research was that a lot was outdated or hard to find, so there’s certainly room for improvement.

Plus, they can learn that investment in accessibility can lead to higher engagement and conversion. Konnie shared that holiday brand TUI’s investment increased sales by 125%, while the reverse is also true, with Lars sharing that 69% of people with disabilities will abandon an online shop if it’s not accessible.

With rising competition, both here in the UK and internationally, the digital experience is a critical differentiator for universities competing for students. From making content more digestible and understanding how students utilise AI to engage with it, to appreciating that accessibility is more than an exercise of compliance, there are key actions universities can take to make the experience better for everyone.

Ready to transform your university’s digital experience? Watch the full webinar and download our research report today. And contact our experts to start your journey today.