ACCESSIBILITY GUIDELINES

When websites and web tools are properly designed and coded, people with disabilities can use them. Making the Web accessible benefits individuals, businesses, and society. The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. At Cayuga, we aim to meet this goal by ensuring our websites and services are accessible to people with diverse hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.

Since its founding in 1994 by Web Inventor Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) has developed the foundational technical standards upon which the Web has flourished. Web accessibility depends on several components working together, including web technologies, web browsers, authoring tools, and websites.

The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) develops technical specifications, guidelines, techniques, and supporting resources that describe accessibility solutions. These are considered international standards for web accessibility and are called W3C Recommendations, otherwise known as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Web “content” generally refers to the information on a web page or web application, including:

  • natural information such as text, images, and sounds
  • code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.

WCAG also applies to dynamic content such as multimedia or mobile content.

GUIDELINE DOCUMENTS

Resources for creating accessible documents:

PowerPoint Best practices for improving PowerPoint accessibility.

Word Documents A self-paced online course providing an overview of how to make Microsoft Word documents accessible.

Excel Documents Microsoft Excel spreadsheet accessibility step-by-step guide.

PDF Documents PDF accessibility techniques using Adobe Acrobat.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. Cayuga Community College is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.