Jackson College

Digital Accessibility

Digital Accessibility

Jackson College is committed to ensuring that all of our digital materials—including websites, online services, documents, and learning platforms—are accessible to everyone, including individuals with disabilities. We continuously work to improve accessibility across our digital environments in alignment with federal and state regulations, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Our goal is to provide an inclusive digital experience for all members of our community.

Jackson College Website

To help make the Jackson College website a positive place for everyone, we’ve been using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities, and user-friendly for everyone. The guidelines have three levels of accessibility (A, AA and AAA). We’ve chosen Level AA as the target for the Jackson College website.

Policy

Website accessibility policy

Accessibility Guidelines and Testing

The college uses SiteImprove, a paid service, to ensure new pages on the Jackson College website comply with best practices and accessibility guidelines as defined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (down to Level AA) and Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act (2017).

SiteImprove offers regularly scheduled, automated checks as well as on-demand checks against WCAG 2.0 Level A and Level AA criteria.

Jackson College also uses a number of additional accessibility tools and checkers:

  • WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool offered by WebAim. A free WAVE browser extension is available for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
  • Siteimprove Google Chrome Extension
  • Google Chrome Web Developer Toolbar
  • Google Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools
  • Manual review of HTML code
  • NVDA screen reader

Accessibility Training & Publishing Workflow

As part of our training program for new website developers, College marketing staff cover common accessibility checkpoints, including alternate text descriptions for images, properly tagging attachments, using descriptive text for hyperlinks, captions for videos, properly structuring page headings, among other accessibility best practices.

Every webpage edit goes through a content management system publishing workflow review to catch issues before they are published to the live website. Issues that are found are remediated and follow-up training is provided to web content authors.

Digital Accessibility