Accessibility

System President's Procedure SP 3-12-g requires the Northeastern website to comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG) - Level AA. The website meets this standard but it is each user's responsibility to maintain the system to keep it in compliance.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

Principle 1 - Perceivable

Information and user interface components must be presentable to users in ways they can perceive.

Images

The website is set up so that any image added to the website has alternative text. This is a required field. The text should be as descriptive as possible within the limited field. Instead of "Student reading" it should provide a description "Image of female student lying on the grass reading a book about Nursing". This is also a great place to include keywords.

Videos

All videos on the website must be captioned including songs. Video producers should take this into consideration when creating the content so that Auto Caption is functioning.

Text

Use headings on pages with large amounts of content. This allows the screen reader user to skim the content and determine what sections they want to read. The website is coded to utilize the appropriate contrast.

Principle 2 - Operable

Website operations are managed by the website host.

PDFs

Documents when they are converted to PDFs loose the source formatting in conversion. Even if the source document is accessible, the conversion process will scramble the navigation tags and heading tags to make them inoperable on the website. Unless the creator has the knowledge and skills to make the PDF completely accessible, PDF's will not be loaded onto our website. Use FormStack or a web form as alternatives.

Principle 3 - Understandable

Information and the operation of the user interface must be understandable.

Avoid jargon on the website whenever possible. If it is necessary, provide a definition or meaning of an abbreviation within the text.

EAB recommends the Gunning Fog Index http://gunning-fog-index.com/ to check the complexity of the language used on the website. If you question if your content is too complex for even new to college students, paste the content into the tool. A score less than 8 is near universal, but less than 12 is acceptable for a wide audience.

Principle 4 - Robust

Maximize compatibility with current and future user agents, including assistive technologies.