Web Accessibility Guidelines

The Office of Academic Empowerment and Accessibility is dedicated to the philosophy that all CSU students are assured equal opportunity, access and participation in the university courses, programs, activities, services, and facilities.

Central State University web accessibility policy is guided by the U. S. Justice rule, which mandates all state and local governments, including Ohio counties, must make their websites and mobile apps accessible to people with disabilities.  The purpose of this policy is to ensure that university digital content and applications are accessible so that people with disabilities may fully participate in university services, programs, and activities. 

The university is committed to diversity and fostering a campus culture of full inclusion of people with disabilities by ensuring that all university constituencies (students, prospective students, faculty, staff, student employees, guests, visitors, and program participants with disabilities) can access its digital information and digital services.  This includes ensuring everyone can easily use and understand content, such as university board meeting minutes, public notices, online payment systems, permit applications and forms, live video streams and virtual meetings.  This includes providing text descriptions for images, allowing full use by keyboard, providing captions, for videos and transcripts for audio, using readable text and colors combinations, and ensuring link text is clear and pages are well organized.

This policy covers all digital services (current, legacy, and archived) and provides requirements for accessibility. All digital information and digital services acquired, developed, or delivered by any unit must be accessible and in compliance with the Minimal Digital Accessibility Standards (MDAS).  Legacy (including archived digital information and digital services are subject to the applicable university web and digital accessibility standards in effect at the time of development and to this policy’s specific provisions for legacy digital information and digital services.  Legacy digital information and digital services must be made compliant with the MDAS when any substantial changes or upgrades occur.

The following are not subject to this policy even when hosted on university resources:

1. Digital information of a personal nature, and
2. Student organization websites that do not conduct university business.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2)

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, are technical standards that help make the digital world accessible to people with disabilities.  Numerous stake holders, including disability advocacy groups, government agency groups, government agencies, and accessibility research organizations, collaborated to create these guidelines, which are considered the universal standard for digital accessibility.

Importantly, WCAG is not a law, but a set of technical standards that, when followed, improves organizations’ accessibility of web content, websites, and web applications for people with disabilities.  Many of the guidelines can also be used to improve mobile applications, self-service kiosk software, and other digital experiences. These standards assist universities to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and therefore, should follow WCAG standards.  WCAG includes many success criteria that developers and designers can apply to remove barriers access for people with disabilities in digital environments.

Below are several examples of web accessibility best practices recommended by WCAG:

• Ensure form-entry functions have either no time limit or an extended time limit for those who need more time.
• Provide consistent elements, including navigation features, headers, footers, and side bars, across all web pages.  This consistent approach helps ensure end users can easily find these elements on any webpage.
• Make your website navigable without using a mouse, the keyboard “tab”, alone should enable end users to navigate any page on your website.
• Provide a proper, clearly identifiable content level structure for screen reader users.
• Use a proper contrast ratio between foreground text and background colors for those with vision-related disabilities.
• Avoid design elements that may induce seizures.  For example, no website element should be more than three times in one-second interval.
• Help users prevent and fix their mistakes.  For example, provide text descriptions of all automatically detected errors.

POUR

What is POUR and why is it critical to WCAG standards?

WCAG standards are rooted in four main principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, often called POUR.

1. Perceivable – Information and user interface components must be presented to users in ways they perceive.  It’s important to present information in different ways, where a user can adjust color contrast, font size, or view captions for videos.
2. Operable - User interface components and navigation must be functional for users in ways they can operate.  A user must be able to perform required interactions using a keyboard or voice commands, not just the mouse alone.
3. Understandable – Information and user interface must be understandable.  Information and instructions should be clear and navigation methods should be easy to understand and use.
4. Robust – Content must be robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of users and assistive technologies, evolve, code and content should remain accessible for users of common and current assistive devices and tools.

OAEA Process and Role

• Any member of the campus community can visit the OAEA, located in the Lackey Lee Student Health Center, to request services. 
• Once an individual completes/returns the OAEA application, along with any qualifying documentation there will be a scheduled Intake Meeting.
• The OAEA Compliance Coordinator will review the information with the requestor to determine if or any Web Accessible Equipment is required.
• The OAEA Compliance Coordinator will work with the appropriate offices on campus to meet the Web Accessibility Guidelines.