Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning

Wix is used for designing and building your own high-quality websites. Wix offers customizable templates as well as advanced features for design and allows users to link their site to other media platforms.

With a free account, users have access to:

• Free reliable web hosting
• Top security
• Customizable templates
• Up to 500MB of storage and bandwidth

Wix is best for

• Beginners: those who aren't as technologically-savvy and have no prior HTML or coding experience
• Building a website platform for professional or personal uses from a choice of many pre-made templates

Limitations

• Free and starter plan does not remove Wix advertisements and logos from your site
• No plans that offer unlimited bandwidth or storage

Accessibility

Wix has some assistive settings that are automatically enabled when you create a website, including

• Full keyboard functionality
• Smart focus ring to assist keyboard users 
• Accessible templates to build a website

Read more about Wix's accessibility features. 

When creating content on Wix, make sure to review our help guide Make Your Digital Media Projects Accessible. 

Resources

Google Sites allows you to build internal project hubs, team sites, and public-facing sites and they will be automatically added to your Google drive. You can edit a Google Site together with someone else in real time, and see each other’s changes live. Publish the site for everyone to see, or restrict sharing permissions and make the site accessible only to people you want to share it with.

Google Sites is an open source tool and free for anyone to use.

Google Sites is best for

• Beginners:
  • Easy and intuitive website design.
• Team-based website creation:
  • Connects with other Google applications including Docs, Drive, Calendar, etc.   
• Great for short-term, quick projects.

Limitations

• Design and feature-limited. 
• Not meant for long-term website projects due to its simplicity.
• Cannot add or edit CSS.
• No option for custom domain name.

Accessibility 

There have been some issues with creating accessible content on Google Sites. Some accessibility issues can be improved by following web accessibility standards, but there remains some issues:

• Headings are not editable and are set to heading 2, but is missing heading 1
• Alt tags can only be added within the HTML editor once the image is placed. 
• Tables can only be used for layout purposes and cannot be made accessible

Because of these issues, it is recommended that web developers that utilize a screen reader use other publishing services. 

Source: Office of Information Technology, University of Colorado Boulder

Resources

WordPress is a content-management system and blogging tool, providing plenty of design elements and themes. Wordpress is used both for big businesses and individual website building and blogging.

With a free account, users have access to:

• A pre‑installed SSL certificate
• Dozens of free themes
• 3GB of storage space

WordPress is best for

• Professional websites
• More advanced website creators:
  • Basic HTML and coding experience is helpful when using WordPress.

Limitations

• More complicated operations
  • Not for beginners.
• Cannot upload your own themes or plugins.
• Cannot run your own advertisements for earning purposes.

Accessibility

Because WordPress has a lot of choices and options for customization, accessibility is hard to guarantee without a significant time commitment. However, by making smart choices, you can create a more accessible website.

• Choose an accessible WordPress theme 
  • When looking at the themes, click on "Feature Filter" and select "Accessibility Ready" and then apply. 
• There are free WordPress Plugins for Accessibility, like WP Accessibility, if you want to use a different theme. 
• Add the Accessibility Widget that provides the user with the ability to change the font size.
• GSpeech Text to Speech Solution plug-in creates an audio version. 

Source: Breaking Down Barriers: Why WordPress Website Accessibility is Key

Resources

elink.io helps you save web links and bundle them to create beautiful professional content. elink.io helps you save web links, bundle them and turn your web link collections into email newsletters, website or blog content, single web pages, social media bio links, and much more.

With a free account, users have access to:

• 1 published post per day
• 5 links per post
• 3 RSS feeds
• 1GB of storage
• various templates and layouts

elink.io is best for

• Turning web link collections into content:
  • Email newsletters. 
  • Fast website/blog content. 
  • Web pages.
  • Social media links.
• Tracking engagement analytics on shared content.

Limitations

• Design options are slightly limited.
• Unlimited storage requires a paid plan.

Accessibility

The platform is based on a drag and drop model with templates and very little room for customization, so some functionality is limited:

• Heading 1 is missing and cannot be added
• Alt text cannot be added to images
• No ARIA landmarks 

Resources