Statement on Accessibility

Statement on Accessibility

The WAC Clearinghouse is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for all people. We continually strive to improve the user experience, and we welcome feedback on the accessibility of our website. Since we are built on the principle of open access for all, we are dedicated to designing and maintaining a website that allows all visitors to access its contents without barriers and to navigate it easily. We endeavor to design publications that are accessible to all readers and to share information about new and existing publications and resources made available through the Clearinghouse.

In particular, the Clearinghouse is committed to:

Website Maintenance, Security, and Accessibility. The website, which is currently delivered through the open-source Masa Content Management System and the Lucee open-source CFML server, is viewed as a work in progress. As changes in web technologies (HTML, XML, CSS, and so on) evolve, we strive to ensure that we are addressing the challenges facing all web developers and database designers, such as SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting exploits, and various malware attacks. In other words, we do our best to keep our site up-to-date, accessible, and as easy to use as possible. This entails assessing our overall design, our delivery platform, and our efforts to ensure that our web content reflects evolving standards and capabilities related to accessibility.

Accessibility of Books, Journals, and Resources. As the capabilities of the tools we use to publish our books, journals, and resources have evolved, we have worked to ensure that our publications and resources reflect the current state of the art regarding accessibility. This includes the use of Aria labels in our ePub documents, the use of structured HTML and XML in our PDF and ePub documents, and the use of elements related to accessibility in HTML documents. As these tools and standards evolve, we will work to ensure we are using their capabilities in ways that increase accessibility to our publications and resources.

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. The WAC Clearinghouse website is partially conformant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

This site was tested for accessibility in January and February of 2024. Testing included use of visual inspection and VoiceOver technology.

Given the results of this test, we recognize some current limitations in our site’s accessibility. To address these issues, we are currently working to adapt the following:

  • increasing contrast between visual elements and chunking text;
  • minimizing the number of linked pages and combining like content wherever possible;
  • situating visuals and statistics so that they do the work for readers;
  • establishing a review process for PDF accessibility; and
  • providing authors with guidelines for doing so, making sure all buttons have appropriate labels, making archives more accessible, and streamlining navigation processes.

PDFs archived prior to 1999 year may not be accessible. If you need a PDF version of the piece, please reach out to Rebecca Hallman Martini at Rebecca.hallmanmartini@uga.edu.

The WAC Clearinghouse site is designed to be compatible with most assistive technologies including: VoiceOver, Jaws, NVDA, and MS Narrator.

The WAC Clearinghouse site is not known to be incompatible with any browsers. If you encounter any difficulties, please let us know by reaching out to Rebecca Hallman Martini at Rebecca.hallmanmartini@uga.edu.

We welcome your feedback on the accessibility of the WAC Clearinghouse website and its publications. If you encounter accessibility barriers on our website or in our publications, please contact Rebecca Hallman Martini, Associate Publisher for Accessibility and Sustainability, regarding accessibility at Rebecca.hallmanmartini@uga.edu.. We will work to resolve the issues as soon as possible.