September 25, 2019accessibilitymaintenance

Passing Accessibility Scan to be Required Oct. 2

By Mike Marlett

Since moving to the new site design a year ago, we've made a massive number of changes to the site to improve the site's accessibility. The system will not allow you to publish a page that has known accessibility problems.

The technical WCAG 2.0 standards can be found at the w3.org WCAG guidelines site.

This is an excellent accessibility scanner outside of our system.

You can use the Webaim.org scanner to visually show you where your errors are on your published pages. It won't show you unpublished pages in the OmniUpdate side of things. You can also use it to check ANY page that you might be publishing through any other content management systems, such as WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

Some additional information

  1. Headlines are supposed to represent hierarchical structure (in html, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>). It's just like a taxonomy in biology would go domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and then species. Only even easier to remember, because they're numbered. And just like a species can't be named without a genus, an h6 must have an h5 above it. In the hierarchy of the page, it is always OK to follow a heading tag with the same tag, the next lower tag or any higher tag.

  2. Tables are meant to display data. They need a table header row to describe the contents and the data needs to be in each cell. Basically, unless the data you have can ONLY be expressed as a table, then we advise you to not use tables at all. Contact web support for help if you are unsure.

    Use the Table Zebra Stripe snippet for tables; use the Columns snippet if you need to do some sort of layout that you can't otherwise figure out. Tables are actually very important to think about because the computer won't find the problem for you.

Getting Help

If you need help diagnosing, fixing or just generally understanding an accessibility issue, fill out a web support form. We can usually solve your problem in a few minutes (if it is Mon-Fri, 8-5). If there is interest in it, we might also set up advanced web accessibility training classes.