Web Accessibility
As stated in the May 2015 Web Users Group meeting, an accessibility task force has been formed and will meet on a regular basis this summer to provide recommendations for better standards and improvements to VCU’s web presence.
This past week, VCU’s accessibility tool “achecker.ts.vcu.edu” was modified to validate against WCAG 2.0 (Level A) with the option to also check against WCAG 2.0 (Level AA). It is a requirement of the Commonwealth of Virginia that all VCU websites are compliant to WCAG 2.0 (Level A).
The VCU A-Z manager (http://atoz.vcu.edu/manager) is used to continually check for website accessibility compliance on an annual basis. Previously, the accessibility check relied on the Federal 508 standard outlined in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Moving forward, this check will be using the WCAG 2.0 (Level A) standard which encompasses all the 508 rules.
All the details about WCAG 2.0 are available at: http://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG20/quickref/ (Users can customize the documentation to only include Level A Success Criteria and details about HTML, CSS and Client-side Scripting technologies.)
A great resource for how the WCAG standard is different from Section 508 standard is available: http://jimthatcher.com/sidebyside.htm#WCAGView.