Web Page Accessibility

In compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, the university is committed to making its Web sites accessible to everyone.

At a minimum, all official web sites for university academic, administrative and service units must meet Priority One requirements specified on the W3C List of Checkpoints for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Priority One checkpoints are noted here for convenience. Section numbers refer to the W3C "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0"

In General

• 1.1 Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via "alt", "longdesc", or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
• 2.1 Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.
• 4.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions).
• 6.1 Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets. For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document.
• 6.2 Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes.
• 7.1 Until user agents allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker.
• 14.1 Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site's content.

Images and Image Maps

• 1.2 Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map.
• 9.1 Provide client-side image maps instead of server-side image maps except where the regions cannot be defined with an available geometric shape.

Tables

• 5.1 For data tables, identify row and column headers.
• 5.2 For data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers, use markup to associate data cells and header cells.

Frames

• 12.1 Title each frame to facilitate frame identification and navigation.

Applets and Scripts

• 6.3 Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page.

Multimedia

• 1.3 Until user agents can automatically read aloud the text equivalent of a visual track, provide an auditory description of the important information of the visual track of a multimedia presentation.
• 1.4 For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation.

And if all else fails

• 11.4 If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page.

Resources

Guides to web accessibility and implementing new requirements established by the Federal government.

• WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) - Web accessibility "how-tos"
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - From the W3 Consortium
• Evaluation, Repair, and Transformation Tools for Web Content Accessibility
• Accessify.com - Tools, links and resources related to Web page accessibility
• Bobby Accessibility Tester