Accessibility Policy

Commitment

The Public Health Institute (PHI) is committed to making this website accessible to everyone. To ensure that we meet or exceed the requirements of the 1998 Amendment to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and/or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) level AA, PHI continually reviews the website and modifies pages to remove accessibility barriers for people with disabilities.

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please contact us, as PHI is continually striving to improve the experience for all visitors.  If for any reason you cannot access any of the material on our website, please contact us and we will work to resolve the problem.

Standards Compliance

• All Web pages are built using standards-compliant HTML5.
• All pages use structured semantic markup. For instance, each page contains one Header 1 Level Tag, and any appropriate sub-level heading tags. All paragraphs are properly coded with paragraph tags.

Navigation Aids

• All pages on this site include a consistent set of global main navigation links.
• Drop down main navigation menus use “Tab” to access drop down submenus. Right and left arrow keys can be used to move from major heading to major heading, up and down arrow keys are a second way to access submenus.
• A series of shortcuts to skip to the header, content and footer appear when you begin “tabbing” in to the site.
• All sub-navigation menus will appear below the main navigation menu.
• Links
• Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context.
• Many links have title attributes which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target (such as the headline of an article).
• Many browsers (such as JAWS, Home Page Reader, Lynx, and Opera) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page.
• If link text is duplicated; eg. “Read more” links, then “title” text is used to distinguish them.

Images

• All content images used on this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include empty ALT attributes.

Visual Design

• This site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for visual layout. Content is independent of CSS.
• Users may disable CSS or use their own style sheets.
• Where possible color brightness and illuminosity meet WCAG level 2 standards.
• Current page focus is highlighted in contrasting colors.

Accessibility References

• W3 accessibility guidelines 2.0, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• W3 Accessible Techniques 2.0, which explains how to implement each guideline.
• W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer’s guide to accessibility.
• U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility Software and Services

• HTML Validator, a free service for checking that web pages conform to published HTML standards.
• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited demo is available.
• Lynx, a free text-only web browser.
• The Web Accessibility Toolbar (WAT) has been developed to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It consists of a range of functions that identify components of a web page provide access to alternate views of page content and facilitate the use of 3rd party online applications.

Tips on Using this Site

To change the font size in Internet Explorer,Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Safari, use the following key equivalents:

More Keyboard Shortcuts

• Firefox
• Safari
• Internet Explorer 7
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• Opera
• Chrome