These folks believe in accessibility! I am not aware of any formal accessibility policy, however.
The web site is educational in nature and aimed at two audiences, existing members and potential new members or allies. It describes their legislative intiatives and political actions and from time to time suggests activities. Its staff is small, consisting of one full time, some voluvnteers, and "loaners" from member organizations as needed.
The ceo-ct.org web site is low-budget, designed and implemented, in consultation with volunteers, by staff -- for whom learning html was not a priority. The purpose of the policy is to ensure that the site can be made fairly accessible without putting a great deal of time into it.
In addition to making the site more accessible to people who use assistive or alternate technology, the policy guidelines may contribute to providing a consistent appearance to the site and make subsequent updates less demanding. Making this effort will also help ensure that the organization's own behavior is consistent with its goals, ie., that it considers needs of community members in what it does; this is exactly what it asks of coporations.
In pursuit of this goal, the html and css should both validate. The site should:
As a practical matter, CEO webmasters should pass the test set forth in the Section 504 checklist, although presently it is not required to. This checklist is helpful in that it tells what to do and, by way of contrast, what NOT to do.
It is understood that, this being a very small organization, this is a goal, not a requirement.
One aspect that to me makes it less useful is that it ignores what appears to be actual HWG policy. For example, it urges the use of client-side rather than server-side image maps - but I couldn't find any image maps on the site. In fact, the only images I have found are the Guild logo and valid-code logos --and oh, yeah! the Guild tee shirts.
Guild pages provide a nice examaple of how to create a navigation bar without images. If it is in fact a policy to use as few images as possible, the Policy should say so, as it does regarding the use of frames.
There are a couple of additions that could be made:
According to the April 2000 U.S. Attorney General report on the state of federal accessibility:my source: An Overview of Law & Policy for IT Accessibility , Cynthia Waddell and Mark UrbanData provided by the agencies suggest that the majority of agencies that continue to handle IT accessibility issues exclusively on an "ad hoc" or "as needed" basis, instead of integrating accessibility into the development and procurement of their mainstream IT products. Many IT officials hold the mistaken belief that persons with disabilities can always be accommodated upon request by using widely available assistive technology devices (e.g., screen readers, screen enlargers, volume control apparatuses, pointing devices that serve as alternatives to a computer mouse, voice recognition software, etc.) in conjunction with mainstream technology applications. Indeed, the goal of section 508 is to ensure that the agency will always be able to provide reasonable accommodations. Without adequate planning, however, the possibility of providing an accommodation to person with a disability may be foreclosed…. Use of an "ad hoc" or "as needed" approach to IT accessibility will result in barriers for persons with disabilities. A much better approach is to integrate accessibility reviews into the earliest stages of design, development, and procurement of IT. Once an accessible IT architecture is established, then and only then can persons with disabilities be successfully accommodated on an "as needed" basis.[13]
How do you deal with legacy pages and sites? Are there deadlines, grandfather clauses, exceptions, or priorities for retrofitting?
What about editor programs, tools, or testing software? Do you want to mandate the use of Bobby, or anything else? Are there required editors, or any requirements related to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines such as "web designers must use a Single-A ATAG compliant tool"? Remember, you're writing this (theoretical) policy so you can demand whatever you like.
Anything else you want to include in your policy is fine. Are there extensions beyond WCAG Single-A or Double-A that you think are "must-haves"? Or even things not covered by WCAG at all? Feel free to get creative.
Write up a policy which answers the questions above (but not strictly in a question-by-question format! make it look semi- authentic) and then post the URL or the essay here.
Legalese is not really necessary; feel free to write colloquially if you like, assuming your audience is fellow web developers.
Note: If you're putting it on a public web site and it is not really the policy of your site, be sure to label it with a disclaimer. I say this from experience; it's very possible that your page could end up being indexed by a search engine and mistaken for "the real thing" if you're not careful!
Also -- some of you may feel the desire to actually adopt the policy you write on your web sites, or encourage the policy-setters at your site to do so. While this is a great thing and likely would make your ol' teacher proud of you, I'm again stressing that it is not your assignment to change policy at your place of work, your personal site, or whatever, just to write whatever you feel is an appropriate policy based on what you've learned in this course so far. That said -- everyone be sure to enjoy this!