Accessibility
The Online Learning website at Inver Hills Community College has been designed and built to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Sometimes, people with disabilities can find using the web difficult and this website has several planned features to mitigate these concerns. If you have any problems using our site, please contact us.
Standards compliance
All pages comply with priority 1 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (external link)and the US Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines (external link) of the Rehabilitation Act.
All pages validate as XHTML 1 Strict. They use structured semantic markup.
Access keys
Most browsers support navigation to specific links by typing access keys defined on the web site. On Windows, you can press ALT + an access key; on a Macintosh, you can press CTRL + an access key. The following access keys are available throughout the site:
| Access key | Target |
|---|---|
| 1 | Home page |
| 2 | Skip to navigation bar of each page (for screen readers) |
| 3 | Skip to content area of each page (for screen readers) |
| 9 | Contact Us |
| 0 | Accessibility (this page) |
"Skip" links
Each page provides "skip" links to provide a way for a user to bypass repetitive elements on a page. These links allow a user to skip directly to the left navigation menu or the content area of the page. These elements are invisible to many users, but are helpful in improving accessibility for those navigating using only a keyboard or using a screen reader.
Visual design
This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support CSS, the content of each page is still readable. The layout is designed to accomodate the resizing of text at least one text size larger or smaller than the default.
Ensuring accessiblity in Online Courses
Some people find that reading on a computer screen is difficult or causes eyestrain so use common sense techniques to improve readability. Use good contrast to distiguish between a background and overlaying text. Avoid unusual or stylized typefaces.
Many courses incorporate multimedia elements. To aid in accessiblity, offer multiple versions of the audio or video; allow users to choose which format they prefer. Select a file type that can be viewed in most media players such as MP3 or MPEG.
Ideally, any multimedia aspects of a web page should be accessible or have alternative formats to ensure accessibility. For example, an MP3 file should also have an audio transcript. A video file should be closed-captioned or offer a descriptive transcript, preferably both.
