Buffalo State College's official web products are mandated to be accessible to all, including users with vision, motor, or hearing impairments. To ensure ADA accessibility, college websites are designed and developed in adherence with the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA standards. Web accessibility requirements extend to include all images, documents (including PDFs), videos, and applications residing on college web pages, as well as any third-party products connected to sites.
Marketing and Communications web staff members provide accessibility training as part of their regular Drupal training. The team also runs ADA checks on all Drupal sites on a rotating basis; findings are shared with primary web contacts (PWCs) for any needed remediation.
Each area with a web presence is responsible for ensuring that the content, images, documents, and videos found on their site are compliant with WCAG 2.0 Level AA standards. This page explains how to complete an ADA check and also provides resources for closing compliance gaps, including specific guidance for PDF and Microsoft Office documents.
Websites generated from the college’s official installation of Drupal, Buffalo State’s content management system, that do not include user-entered custom code and styling and include alt tags with images, accessible documents, etc., meet mandated compliance guidelines. Sites or parts of sites that do meet compliance will be removed until remdiation can occur.
Alt Tag Example:
Headings Example:
Buffalo State uses Ensemble Video to manage and store audio and video files. To meet accessibility requirements, all video files need to be close captioned and audio files must contain a text alternative or transcript.
Using best-practice design principles will help make self-published, affiliated and unofficial web pages accessible, but additional guidelines must be followed to ensure ADA compliance. Self-publishers uploading work to official college servers should review the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, to gauge the accessibility of their pages and run their sites through a code check, such as WebAIM WAVE. As you engage in the process of performing a site review, here are some very basic accessibility guidelines:
Every college website needs to be evaluated and checked for compliance periodically, as it is easy to fall out of compliance without vigilance. The Marketing and Communications Office runs periodic checks on all official sites and relays the results to site owners. We then rely on Primary Web Contacts to remediate any compliance issues on the website(s) they manage. PWCs are invited are to use the following tools to evaluate sites as well.
