We are pleased to announce that the Highlighter website is now compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Office for Civil Rights. This means that our website has been designed to be accessible by anyone, regardless of their abilities.
The mission of the Office for Civil Rights is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil rights.
According to the Office for Civil Rights:
We serve student populations facing discrimination and the advocates and institutions promoting systemic solutions to civil rights problems. An important responsibility is resolving complaints of discrimination. Agency-initiated cases, typically called compliance reviews, permit OCR to target resources on compliance problems that appear particularly acute. OCR also provides technical assistance to help institutions achieve voluntary compliance with the civil rights laws that OCR enforces. An important part of OCR’s technical assistance is partnerships designed to develop creative approaches to preventing and addressing discrimination.
What did we do to make the Highlighter website ADA-compliant?
Compliance was achieved by the following actions:
- We added “alt” tag descriptions to all images.
- We placed descriptive “title” tags with all relevant spans, such submit buttons.
- We added added ‘longdesc” tags to describe other relevant objects, such as iframes.
- We formatted our HTML code so that it is structured properly and readable without a stylesheet.
The main purpose of these actions was to make our site compatible with screen readers, which will read the text aloud to people who are blind.
Every college and university requires websites to be ADA-compliant in order to be officially used within academic environments. We’re proud that our website now fully meets to these necessary standards.
If you are further interested in exactly what it means for a website to be ADA compliant, learn more by reading the ADA Best Practices Tool Kit for State and Local Governments.
We understand that making our website more accessible is continual a work in progress. If you are use a screen reader, we’d love to hear your feedback regarding our efforts to make our site ADA-compliant. Please get in touch with us directly if you have specific feedback.
Do you have any questions about ADA-compliance? If so, let us know in the comments below.
