Evaluating Websites for Accessibility

Access to websites is essential in today’s digital environment for obtaining information, downloading data, sharing media, obtaining goods and services, and making other transactions. Many websites, however, remain off-limits to people with disabilities, particularly those with sensory impairments, because they are not structured and coded properly for accessibility. It is important that websites support assistive technologies used by people with disabilities, such as screen-reading and magnification software.

This introductory webinar will cover online barriers to accessibility and explain how to check that web content is accessible to all visitors using standards that apply to the federal government under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. As part of this webinar, the presenters will review key components of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines issued by the World Wide Web Consortium, which are incorporated by reference in the Section 508 standards. Presenters will also discuss common problems and easy solutions and share practical tips for improving website accessibility. Attendees can pose questions in advance or during the live webinar. This session is intended for both a general audience as well as website designers and content managers who are experienced, but new to accessibility.

A more advanced session on website accessibility in the federal sector will take place September 24 as part of the Section 508 Best Practices Webinar Series (www.adaconferences.org/CIOC)

Registration

• Required

• Cost - Free

• To register please click here - You must have an account and be signed in to complete your registration. For first time users you must create an account. This step is done only once and you will use the same account to register for different sessions throughout the year. After you create an account, you will immediately be able to register for any of our sessions.

• Continuing Education

  • ACTCP - 1.5 credit hours

  • Certificate of Attendance - 1.5 credit hours

Questions for presenters:

1. What is a good website to go to and have our website reviewed for accessibility.

2. What is the best way to do live testing of your website for accessibility? What is the process?

3. Some local government websites use a tool made by UserWay.org for an accessibility menu. Do tools like this satisfy the requirements needed to make web pages 508 compliant?

4. Regarding Title 2 - state and local governments would your recommend WCAG 2.1 or WCAG 2.0

5. There are certain PDFs we are having to put online. What is the best way to deal with them? What argument can we make to only have the PDF as a web page or to incorporate it into an online form or workflow.

6. What is the proper way to size elements and text on the screen to be responsive? I have the height of the text and graphics scale with the height of the viewport (body font-size: 2.5vh). Then I have elements re-flow horizontally as the viewport width is changed. This works for Landscape oriented screens, but might not for Portrait oriented screens? Some of our people here have one screen turned up and one across.

7. In addition to WebAIM's training on website accessibility, are there any other training/conferences that you recommend?

8. What are your thoughts on Google's Lighthouse tool?

9. What is the best way of making development plans accessible

10. What is the best way of making GIS maps accessible online?

11. How do you make dynamically generated PDFs and directories (unique directories generated from code, upon request) accessible? Adobe's accessibility reports identify issues, but they don't explain where in the code changes are needed.

Session Questions

This session is accepting questions from registered users. After you have registered to participate in this session you can submit your questions on your Account Manager page. Please note: the number of questions will be limited and submissions will be closed well before the session starts to provide time to prepare answers.