Accessibility

What is Accessible Web Content and Why is it Important?

Franklin Special District is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are committed to maintaining our website in conjunction with the department of education to be more accessible and have adopted the WCAG 2.1 AA standard for accessibility. We are continually improving the user experience and applying the relevant accessibility standards. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers on the FSD website or any of our vendor sites.

Accessible Design is Good Design

Web content designed with accessibility in mind is built upon the foundational principle that the site should be easy to navigate, and that content should be easy to understand because it has a strong sense of context. These are principles that are important to all visitors to our website, not just those with disabilities.

Equity

FSD has a responsibility to serve all of our community. Creating accessible content for the web ensures that our students who are deaf, blind and vision impaired or have learning, cognitive or motor disabilities have the same access to services and instruction as the rest of our students.

Legal Liability

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 establishes guidelines that all Information and communications technology must be accessible to all people with disabilities and must be compatible with assistive technologies that make it easier to access that communication. Adhering to the accessibility guidelines below meets our legal obligation by making sure that your page is compatible with those technologies.

 

How do I Create an Accessible Page?

Text

Styles and Color

Certain vision impairments, learning disabilities and cognitive differences make some fonts, font sizes, and font colors significantly easier to read than others. FSD's website is equipped with stylesheets that make it very easy to ensure that your text is styled in an accessible way. All you have to do is leave it alone. If you don't change the font, style or color, your text will be appropriately styled for accessibility.

Heading Structure

It's important to contain the information within your page in a logical structure of headings. Heading 1 is built into the structure of the FSD template. It contains the top-level information about the page. The Subheading for a page is Heading 2. Use headings 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in a nested, hierarchical order to organize your information. For example, several Heading 5 tags can appear under a Heading 4, but a Heading 5 will never appear immediately under a Heading 3.

Our goal is to never use heading styles for emphasis. We have numerous components and snippets available to emphasize important content, and bold and italic styles can be used sparingly.

Accessible Images

Blind and vision-impaired students may use screen readers to read them the contents of websites. In other cases, they may use technologies that increase the font size or contrast of web content. Those visitors may not have access to information contained within images. We will use special care when placing images on a page to ensure that any information conveyed by those images is available to all site visitors.

• Ideally, images which appear on the website will only be photos. 
• Images containing text may only be used when that text is absolutely necessary and the information cannot be conveyed in any other way. For example, an image of a logo which contains text is acceptable, because the color, style and placement of the text are integral to the logo being understood.
• All images must have an image description which describes the content of the image and conveys all of the information of contained within the image to the site visitor. If the image contains structured data of any kind such as headings, lists, dates, times, locations or tabular data, this information cannot be properly structured within an image description tag. If text images are used, the same information will also be included on the page in an accessible format.

Accessible Hyperlinks

• Hyperlinks should always include the title or a description of the target within the hyperlinked text.
  • Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) 
    This is an accessible hyperlink.
• A hyperlink should never include the URL of the hyperlink target or the words "click here"
  • https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/?src=fpco
    This is not an accessible hyperlink.
  • [CLICK HERE] for information about FERPA.
    This is not an accessible hyperlink.

Accessible Video

All video that appears on the FSD website must be closed-captioned for the hearing impaired. We will strive to use only properly closed-captioned videos on the website. 

Below is an example of a properly closed captioned video.

 

Accessible Lists

Lists are a good way to convey several short pieces of information, but creating lists manually by inserting a bullet character or copying and pasting from another program will not produce accessible lists. Using the Bullet List and Numbered List tools within FinalSite CMS will ensure that site visitors who rely on a screen reader and keyboard navigation can explore list content in a way that's easy to use and easy to understand.

Accessible Tables

Creating completely accessible tables is technically complex. Before creating a table, webmasters will consider if the information could be delivered using a combination of nested headings and lists. Otherwise the use of tables will be avoided unless it is the only possible way to convey the information.

If a webmaster must use a table, they are asked to please contact the FSD Accessibility Coordinator  for assistance. 

Accessible Documents

Placing content on a web page is nearly always preferable to linking to a PDF or Microsoft Office document because it's the easiest way to ensure that content is accessible to all users. If other document formats must be used for public consumption, webmasters will work to make those documents accessible.

Accessible Document Reference Resources for Webmasters

• For PDFs: Adobe's guide to creating and verifying PDF accessibility.
• For Word: Make your Word documents accessible to people with disabilities.
• For Excel: Make your Excel documents accessible to people with disabilities.
• For Powerpoint: Make your PowerPoint presentations accessible to people with disabilities.

Webmaster Guidelines for Usage of Images Within Documents

• Graphics that contain tabular data should be created as a table in the document, never as an image or screen shot. Tables must have well-defined descriptive headers on both rows and columns.
• Infographics should be kept as simple as possible and embedded as an individual graphic, not merged with other infographics. Simple infographics should include alternative text containing the entirety of the data contained within the infographic.
• Infographics that must be more complex because they merge multiple sets of data should be paired with a paragraph on the page which outlines and describes significant trends displayed within the infographic.
• In all other cases, the creator should consult with FSD's webmaster or another accessibility expert to ensure that the content is accessible.