An institution’s digital presence plays a critical role in whether prospective students can find, understand and trust the information they need to take their next step. As search engines and AI tools shape how students discover educational opportunities, accessible design, clear content and shared accountability are becoming essential to reducing barriers and building meaningful connections. In this interview, Daniel Gutierrez discusses how accessible content helps prospective students find the answers they need and how web governance supports accurate, consistent information across search engines and AI tools.
The EvoLLLution (Evo): Why do accessibility, content structure, and governance matter so much to the experience prospective students have when encountering an institution online?
Daniel Gutierrez (DG): One of the things that stands out to me is that accessibility, content structure and governance are really one discipline, and they matter most for students with the least time to dig. Your website is usually a student’s first conversation with your institution. If they can’t find or trust an answer, they leave without even telling you.
For working parents and first-generation students, a confusing page isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a barrier. That’s what makes accessibility an equity issue. We’re seeing that firsthand at San José City College, as we work through our own branding and accessibility standards, including identifying an alternate shade of our signature yellow that meets current accessibility requirements.
Evo: How does content structure affect whether prospective students can actually find, navigate and understand the information they need to make decisions?
DG: Organization around students’ questions is what we focus on, not the college’s org chart or what we, as the people working here, feel is important. I’ve tried to take the voice of the student and ask: What questions are they asking? What are they looking for? We’re in a unique position because we have student interns, and I’ll often just turn to them and ask, “When you’re on this page, what are you looking for?”
It’s plain, easy and immediate student feedback, and I try to build the page around that. About 68% of our website visits come from search, so most students arrive with a specific question. They don’t just come to browse. That’s where having the student voice sitting alongside me is so important.
Evo: What does effective web governance look like, and why is keeping institutional content accurate, consistent and accessible increasingly important for people and their digital discovery tools?
DG: Well, governance keeps the content true after you fix it, and AI raises the stakes. We really value the subject matter experts. We’re a small team of two, my supervisor and I, so we can’t write every page or edit all the content with that expertise. The content we rely on comes from the departments. So, governance means clear ownership, shared standards and a single request process.
In our marketing department, we have an online work request form we encourage other departments to fill out, so we have everything documented. We have a queue loaded up, and we rely on them to give us content that’s accurate and clear for students, then we go in and tweak it with our subject matter experts, including the students and student interns. That’s how we try to manage our websites and webpages.
Evo: How are accessibility and content structure influencing whether institutional information can be surfaced and understood?
DG: AI and assistive technology reward many of the same things, and most of AI’s influence is invisible. Real text, logical headings, descriptive links, tagged documents and clean structure all help accessibility, screen readers and AI alike. Content locked in images and untagged PDFs is less reliable for both. So, we recognize that and reach out to organizations that can help with those issues.
Accessibility gives you a strong foundation, but it’s not the whole job. AI also needs consistent facts and direct answers to real questions. That’s how we face that. It’s a new frontier for us, as we try to figure out how to get clear and accurate information into AI. Each day there’s something new that we learn that informs how we handle that, so it’s a new and exciting frontier for us.
Evo: What should institutions be doing right now to create a web presence that is accessible and useful to prospective students while making content easier for the search engines and AI systems to discover, interpret and connect?
DG: Start with what matters most and keep it going. What’s important? What are the core values of the institution? Test your pages with real questions and several tools because each one sees you differently. In a test earlier this year, our visibility ranged from about 8% to 28%, depending on the different tools out there, so we’re trying to measure as much as we can, learn and identify those gaps.
We try to fix the highest-stakes pages first. When we get update requests, I’ll test those pages against some of the tools out there. If a page isn’t accessible in terms of color, content or contrast, I’ll make quick tweaks. If I know other pages have those same elements, I’ll make the change across the site.
Consistency is also important. For us, that means using the approved institution name, accurate page titles and consistent branding. We give departments the standards and tools they need, including our branding guide, so they can keep things accessible, accurate and consistent.
Evo: Is there anything you’d like to add?
DG: There is a piece that I’ve started to use more recently because I took a course where we tackled GEO, this new way of thinking about generative engine optimization. One thing I took away was how you can prompt AI to help you with accessibility, GEO and anything else you need to uncover. I created these prompts, but I don’t rely on them 100%. I use them as tools to identify blind spots.
I’ll take the code, copy it and paste it in there, and ask the AI to identify blind spots on the page around accessibility, branding and style alignment or even HTML coding. I also add our style guidelines, which follow Associated Press style. It gives me a list of things to check, like making sure phone numbers, hours and colors are consistent and accessible.
Those are the tools you have to think outside the box with: How can I make this accessible, searchable and easier for AI to find? When students turn to ChatGPT or other AI searches, we want to be up there and easily found.
Photo caption: With search engines and AI tools acting as the main channels for discoverability, institutions of higher education must work to create meaningful connections with prospective students through consistent, accessible content.