Accessibility Statement

My goal is to produce websites that are highly usable and highly accessible. The Internet should provide information and communication resources for all people without exception. Web page features designed to assist people with disabilities typically provide benefits to everybody.

Standards Compliance

(jump down | back to top)

1. All pages on this site are validated to satisfy AAA and Section 508 standards using A-Prompt software.
2. All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 and H3 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, users of JAWS screen reader software can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+3. Images used to make special font titles are contained within H1 tags.
   
3. Skipover links are provided to allow people using screen readers to bypass large blocks of navigation links.

Navigation

(jump down | back to top)

1. Site organization and positional awareness are provided via drop-down menu and signpost trail (breadcrumbs). Current page position is indicated by converting navigation links into plain text marked with asterisks, strong tags and em tags.
   
2. All pages have top, home, search and map links to aid navigation. Long pages have internal links to allow the reader to jump down to the desired subsection or up to the top of the page.
3. The site includes a search page and a site map.
4. Text links are used for navigation. Dropdown menus degrade acceptably to a list of text links on any system that does not support Javascript.
5. Link text was written to make sense out of context.
6. Unvisited links are displayed in bold blue text. Visited links are displayed in plain purple text.
   
7. Links that jump from section to section within a page allow the pages to be navigated with keyboard commands. 

Images

(jump down | back to top)

1. All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.
2. Complex images include LONGDESC attributes or inline descriptions to explain the significance of each image to non-visual readers. 

Page Styles

(jump down | back to top)

1. Cascading style sheets are used to control the style of the web pages. This allows people with special viewing requirements to use their own style sheets when viewing the pages.
2. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
3. Page layout was done via tables because many people still use versions of browser software that don't fully and uniformly support CSS positioning methods.
   
4. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.  Instructions for text size adjustments.
   
5. ?? Accessible forms ?? 

References

(back to top)

1. This statement is based on the accessibility statement from Dive Into Accessibility.
2. W3 accessibility guidelines explain the reasons behind each guideline.
3. U.S. Section 508 accessibility guidelines.
4. Member of Guild of Accessible Web Designers.