Accessibility Statement

The WIHD website was constructed to comply with Section 508 Accessibility Standards and The World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 Priority 1.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 are a W3C specification providing guidance on accessibility of Web sites for people with disabilities. They have been developed by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. The specification contains fourteen guidelines which are general principles of accessible design. Each guideline is associated with one or more checkpoints describing how to apply that guideline to particular features of Web pages.

In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act (Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended 29 U.S.C. § 794d) to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.

General guidelines used:

• using clear and consistent navigation aids
• providing enough contrast between text and background
• providing a site map as well as search feature
• use of clear, simple and objective language whenever possible
• adhering to good design practices including scannable layout, meaningful sub-headings, usage of bulleted lists and visual guides to structure meaning as well as usage of a reading level that is appropriate for the audience

Acronyms and Abbreviations

This site makes use of many acronyms and abbreviations. We define each instance with the an HTML tag as needed.

Forms

Forms have their labels explicitly associated with their controls, aiding users of certain screenreaders and speech browsers.

Data Tables

For data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers, markup is used to associate data cells and header cells.

Downloadable files/Files needing a plug-in

We have a large number of documents in Adobe Acrobat® Portable Document Format (PDF). PDF format is used to preserve the content and layout of our hard copy publications. Publications in PDF can only be viewed and printed using the Adobe® Reader®. You can download and get help using the Acrobat Reader at the Adobe Systems, Inc. site. The downloadable Adobe® Reader® software is available at no charge from Adobe. People using screen-reading devices generally are unable to read documents directly in PDF format, unless they have an accessibility plug-in installed on their system along with the Adobe® Reader®. This plug-in is also available free of charge from Adobe.

Adobe Accessibility page:
http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/accessibility/main.html

We strive to make all pdf-files that are created by us accessible. Link to the plug-in is provided with each such file.

Headers/Page Organization

Our pages use structured headers to aid legibility. The first header on the page is the main content header followed by any appropriate sub-headers.

Images

All content images used in the home page and all archives include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes.

Links

This site uses meaningful link descriptions that define the link destination. There are no links that open pop-up windows.

Visual Design

This site and all its archives use cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards

WebXACT (owned by Watchfire Corporation), is a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. (Note: Watchfire acquired the Web accessibility software program "Bobby" from the Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST, Inc. The service is now known as WebXACT).