Website Accessibility
Jackson College understands that cultivating a broadly diverse community is crucial to our educational mission and to our foundational commitment to leadership and service. Jackson College is fully committed to ensuring our website is accurate and accessible to everyone including those with disabilities. We are currently working to increase accessibility and usability of our website to meet or exceed the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1991 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
To help make the Jackson College website a positive place for everyone, we’ve been using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities, and user-friendly for everyone. The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). We’ve chosen Level AA as the target for the Jackson College website.
Accessibility Guidelines and Testing
The college uses SiteImprove, a paid service, to ensure new pages on the w4k.2szx.net website comply with best practices and accessibility guidelines as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (down to Level AA) and Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act (2017).
SiteImprove offers regularly scheduled, automated checks as well as on-demand checks against WCAG 2.0 Level A and Level AA criteria.
Jackson College also uses a number of additional accessibility tools and checkers:
- WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool offered by WebAim. A free WAVE browser extension is available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
- Siteimprove Google Chrome Extension
- Google Chrome Web Developer Toolbar
- Google Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools
- Manual review of HTML code
- NVDA screen reader
Accessibility Training & Publishing Workflow
As part of our training program for new website developers, College marketing staff cover common accessibility checkpoints, including alternate text descriptions for images, properly tagging attachments, using descriptive text for hyperlinks, captions for videos, properly structuring page headings, among other accessibility best practices.
Every webpage edit goes through a content management system publishing workflow review to catch issues before they are published to the live website. Issues that are found are remediated and follow-up training is provided to web content authors.
Reporting Accessibility Issues
Jackson College strives to adhere to the accepted guidelines and standards for accessibility and usability as comprehensively as possible on this website.
We are continually seeking solutions that will bring all areas of the site up to the same level of overall web accessibility. In the meantime should you experience any difficulty in accessing the Jackson College website, please don’t hesitate to contact us by filling out the form below.