Web Accessibility

Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable and functional by persons of all abilities. When websites, applications and tools are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality including, but not limited to, those who may have:

• An inability to see, hear, or move easily.
• Eyes, ears, or hands that are busy or interfered with.
• Colour-blindness or other visual impairments.
• Difficulty reading or comprehending text.
• No access to a keyboard or mouse, or who do not have the ability to use one.
• An early version of a browser, a non-standard browser, a voice browser or other assistive technology, or a non-standard operating system.
• A slow Internet connection, a small screen such as on a mobile device, or a text-only screen
• Difficulty with navigating the Internet due age-related illness or technology ability.
• Navigated the Internet through some form of social media.

At Eastminster United Church we are guided by the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) when developing our web site. In 2005 we began the work to become compliant to the W3C WCAG 2.0 and 1.0 guidelines. This led to achieving compliance to these guidelines on our website. Since then we have continued to follow these guidelines while developing new applications and online tools. With recent activity around the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) and the development of the Information and Communications Standard in Ontario, we began to work towards compliance to the W3C WCAG 2.0 guidelines in 2010 to become aligned with this standard.

A part of this work has involved establishing a culture of Web accessibility compliance within our organization to ensure that all of those who are involved in the development and deployment of our online presence are aware of how to perform their work to achieve that compliance and why it is important that they do so. To that end we perform testing using industry standard assistive technology tools such as speech and text browsers, magnification tools and code validation tools. By focusing in on the key aspects of our sites, we work to ensure the accessibility of images, multimedia, forms, data tables and other elements through the utilization of these tools. As we do so, we will be looking to further increase the accessibility of these aspects and others on our sites.