What is the Hero Banner?
On the homepage of your VCC, a "hero banner" section is added underneath the primary navigation bar. If you use the Events module, you can optionally display a calendar overlay in this area.
Newer clients can add only a single banner. Older clients can still add multiple slides to create a carousel, but uConnect recommends using only one banner and displays a prominent in-app warning when adding or editing additional banners.
Because the carousel is no longer supported for new clients, no further accessibility enhancements will be made to it. However, accessibility, visual, and responsive design enhancements have been made for sites using a single banner.
What should I do if I receive an accessibility report about my homepage banner or carousel?
If you are using a banner, ensure that you have entered alt text for the image if it's not used in a decorative way. Purely decorative or atmospheric images do not require alt text. However, if your banner image contains text, repeat that text in the alt text field so visitors using assistive technology can access it. Note: if you use the banner's text overlay boxes, do not repeat that overlaid text in the alt text field, as it will be read twice by screen readers.
If you are using multiple banners in a carousel, we recommend removing Banner 2, Banner 3, and/or Banner 4 so that only a single banner remains. This resolves the most common carousel-related accessibility issues.
Learn more about editing your homepage banners: Add a front page banner
Why is the carousel no longer supported?
The carousel is no longer supported for new clients because research conducted during the WCAG AA upgrade found that carousels are both inaccessible and ineffective. For example, interaction statistics from Notre Dame University (not a uConnect platform; study published 2013) revealed that only 1% of visitors clicked a carousel feature — and of those, 89% clicked the item in the first position. Should I use a carousel? provides a broader overview of these issues.
A review of uConnect client sites identified additional common problems, including:
- Text-heavy banner images without alt text, making content invisible to screen readers
- "Carousel dots" (slide navigation indicators) overlapping page content on mobile devices when banners were optimized for desktop only
To address these and other issues, the carousel functionality has been disabled for all new Virtual Career Center instances in favor of a single-banner layout, which is better optimized for accessibility and the mobile experience. Additional styles were introduced to improve the readability of text overlay content on mobile devices.
For existing sites, we didn't want to suddenly remove functionality that our clients were actively using. Multi-banner carousels can still be used, but we added an in-app warning about the accessibility considerations when clients edit their banners.
Proactively identifying and addressing accessibility gaps — rather than waiting for an external report — is a meaningful benefit for institutional partners. Being notified rather than suddenly blocked allows career services teams to adjust their content strategy at a pace that works for their institution.