The student drop-off your analytics may not explain

An admissions dashboard records a financial-aid form as "abandoned" the moment a student closes the tab. What it does not record is why. A student using assistive technology can spend forty minutes on a form with an unlabeled field, an error message that gives no useful direction, and focus that jumps somewhere unexpected — and still show up in the data exactly like someone who simply changed their mind.

"Abandonment" assumes a choice that was not always there

A dip at the same stage of the funnel can represent very different experiences: one student genuinely lost interest, another hit a form they could not navigate by keyboard, another opened a PDF their assistive technology could not interpret. The dashboard logs all three as the same outcome. The students did not have the same outcome.

Why this belongs outside the compliance conversation

Accessibility is usually discussed alongside audits, standards and remediation — a compliance topic with its own review cycle. A student is not asking a compliance question. They are asking whether they can complete the form, understand the next step, and finish it without help. That question belongs in the same conversations as enrollment, digital strategy and retention, not just the ones about audit findings.

What to check when a stage shows an unusual drop-off

• Complete the flow keyboard-only, the way a screen-reader or switch-device user would.
• Open every document and form field with the assistive technology students actually use, not just a visual review.
• Read the error messages the way a screen reader announces them — a message that's visually obvious can announce nothing useful.
• Treat an unexplained drop at a specific stage as a prompt to test accessibility there, rather than waiting for the next scheduled audit.

Next step

Point us at the stage in your funnel where the numbers don't add up, and we'll help you figure out whether the barrier is friction, messaging — or something a student literally could not get past.