This website is designed to be accessible and standards compliant.
It adheres to WCAG 2.0 AA & WAI-ARIA accessibility guidelines and is compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.
Web content requires semantic information about widgets, structures, and behaviors, in order to allow assistive technologies to convey appropriate information to persons with disabilities.
Additionally, this website is designed to work with older and newer browsers through progressive enhancement, and officially supports Internet Explorer 9 and up, along with the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Internet Explorer 8 and below generally see very low usage, and most agency websites should be able to safely begin support at Internet Explorer 9.
Section 508
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d) as amended by the Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that all electronic and information technology that is developed by or purchased by the Federal Agencies be accessible by people with disabilities. This applies to Web applications, Web pages and all attached files on the intranet, as well as, internet.
WCAG 2.0 AA
WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) ensure that content is accessible by everyone, regardless of disability or user device. To meet these standards, text and interactive elements should have a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.
This ensures that viewers who cannot see the full color spectrum are able to read the text.
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) - ARIA (Assistive Rich Internet Applications)
ARIA (Assistive Rich Internet Applications), is a specification from the W3C and created to improve accessibility of applications by providing extra information to screen readers via HTML attributes.
Out of the box, screen readers work with regular HTML, but adding ARIA can provide screen reader users with more context and greater interactivity with content. ARIA has no effect on how elements are displayed or behave in browsers. It does not add new functionality and is meant to act only as an extra descriptive layer for screen readers.