Museumofdisability.org/html/ Accessibility Statement

This is the official accessibility statement for The Museum of diABILITY History. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at tfraser@people-inc.org

Our Design Standard

We designed to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0, which is a World Wide Web Consortium.

The following are some of the key guidelines we adopted from this standard, as well as other useful guidelines from around the Web.

Structure

  • Make the site structure clear, consistent, and obvious.
  • Provide a site map to show how the site is organized

Content

  • Structure pages of text well, with clear, meaningful, parallel headings.
  • Provide text alternatives for all images. The exception is in the case of purely decorative, content-free graphics, such as a bullet or rule.
  • Provide a short summary at the top of each document.

Visual and multimedia

  • Use only relevant images
  • Use pull-down menus sparingly, if at all.
  • All clickable targets in the interface, such as tabs and buttons will be large. Large text for links increases readability target size.
  • Support font scaling and larger font sizes in general.

Code

  • All code is XHTML/CSS standards compliant, well structured, and well crafted.
  • The presentation is separate from structure.

Browser Support

We designed to support the following browsers specifically, as well as all standards-compliant browsers.

  • Internet Explorer 6 for Windows
  • Internet Explorer 7 for Windows
  • Mozilla Firefox for Windows
  • Mozilla Firefox for Macintosh
  • Safari for Macintosh

Links

  • Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).

Images

  • All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes.

Visual design

  • This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout.
  • This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified "text size" option in visual browsers.
  • If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

A note about Accessibility Badges

We do not display accessibility-standards approved badges. Tools such as Bobby do not give a complete picture of the site’s accessibility in practice. A website might pass all possible validators and still provide a very bad experience. The evaluation tools are a means, rather than an end to themselves.

Our target is to meet all WAI guidelines through Level 2 priority and Section 508 guidelines, which are a subset of the former. However, we will favor good design principles over specific technical guidelines that may apply only to current technology.

Accessibility references

Accessibility software

  • JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
  • NVDA, a free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows Operating System.
  • Lynx, a free text-only web browser for blind users with refreshable Braille displays.
  • Links, a free text-only web browser for visual users with low bandwidth.

Accessibility services

  • Bobby, a free service to analyze web pages for compliance to accessibility guidelines. A full-featured commercial version is also available.
  • HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
  • Web Page Backward Compatibility Viewer, a tool for viewing your web pages without a variety of modern browser features.
  • Lynx Viewer, a free service for viewing what your web pages would look like in Lynx.

Related resources

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