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Accessibility

This is the accessibility statement for the core of the Pierce College District 11 Web site. This statement only applies to pages using the "core" design, version 2006a. Other Pierce College sub-sites may or may not meet these standards.

Pierce College is committed to ensuring that our Web site is accessible to all. Accessibility is a continuous work in progress, so please contact us if you have comments or suggestions.

Navigation aids

  1. All pages using this design include a link directly to the college home page.
  2. Most pages using this design include a district site-wide navigation element, with links to the major sections of the district's site.
  3. Most pages using this design include a section navigation, with the title of the section and links to many related pages.
  4. All navigation sections can be skipped by selecting the "skip to page content" link, included on all pages using this design.
  5. All pages using this design include a search box. You can search for Web content using Google's "university search" service, or for staff/faculty in the district directory.
  6. H1 tags are used for main titles, H2 and H3 tags for subtitles. For example, on this page, JAWS users can skip to the next section within the accessibility statement by pressing ALT+INSERT+2.

Text-sizing

  1. This design uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
  2. Users of Internet Explorer and Firefox can change the size of text in our site by selecting "View -> Text Size" from the top menu.
  3. A JavaScript-based tool is provided for text-resizing. This tool provides three text sizes.

Links

  1. Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target.
  2. Links are written to make sense out of context.

Images

  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. Maps are generally not described in this way at this time.

Visual design

  1. This design uses Cascading Style Sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.
  2. A print style sheet is provided for easier printing.
  3. This design has been tested in a variety of visual browsers. If you are using a visual browser and have difficulties accessing a page's content, please let us know.

Standards compliance

Many common accessibility standards rely heavily on the author's or designer's judgement. We have tested the pages using this design and used common sense where the guidelines or results of testing were unclear.

The common design features have been tested to meet all of the standards listed below, but we may have missed something in a page or two. Notice an error? Let us know!

  1. All pages using this design are WCAG AA approved, complying with all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
  2. All pages using this design comply with the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines.
  3. All pages using this design validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and use valid CSS
  4. All pages using this design use structured semantic markup.

Accessibility references

  1. W3C accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
  2. W3C accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
  3. W3C accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
  4. U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

About this statement

This statement is not a requirement for Pierce College Web sites at this time, but we include it here for the benefit of our site's users and as a service to other college developers.

The concept for this statement, and many of the techniques used to improve this design's accessibility, were inspired by Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Accessibility series and by Gez Lemon's article "Writing a Good Accessibility Statement".