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MJC is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are in the process of revising our website in conjunction with the department of education to make our website more accessible and have adopted the WCAG 2.1 AA standard for accessibility. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone and applying the relevant accessibility standards. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers on the MJC website or any of our vendor sites.

What is Accessible Web Content and Why is it Important?

Accessible Design is Good Design

Web content designed with accessibility in mind is built upon the foundational principle that the site should be easy to navigate, and that content should be easy to understand because it has a strong sense of context. These are principles that are important to all visitors to our website, not just those with disabilities.

Equity

MJC has a responsibility to serve all of our community. Creating accessible content for the web ensures that our students who are deaf, blind and vision impaired or have learning, cognitive or motor disabilities have the same access to services and instruction as the rest of our students.

Legal Liability

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 establishes guidelines that all Information and communications technology must be accessible to all people with disabilities and must be compatible with assistive technologies that make it easier to access that communication. Adhering to the accessibility guidelines below meets our legal obligation by making sure that your page is compatible with those technologies.

How do I Create an Accessible Page?

Text

Styles and Color

Certain vision impairments, learning disabilities and cognitive differences make some fonts, font sizes, and font colors significantly easier to read than others. MJC's website is equipped with stylesheets that make it very easy to ensure that your text is styled in an accessible way. All you have to do is leave it alone. If you don't change the font, style or color, your text will be appropriately styled for accessibility.

Heading Structure

It's important to contain the information within your page in a logical structure of headings. Heading 1 is built into the structure of the MJC template. It contains the top-level information about the page. The Subheading for a page is Heading 2. Use headings 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in a nested, hierarchical order to organize your information. For example, several Heading 5 tags can appear under a Heading 4, but a Heading 5 will never appear immediately under a Heading 3.

Never use heading styles for emphasis. We have numerous components and snippets available to emphasize important content, and bold and italic styles can be used sparingly.

Accessible Images

Blind and vision-impaired students may use screen readers to read them the contents of websites. In other cases, they may use technologies that increase the font size or contrast of web content. Those visitors may not have access to information contained within images. Special care must be used when placing images on a page to ensure that any information conveyed by those images is available to all site visitors.

  • Ideally, images which appear on the website will only be photos. Please consult your webmaster or public relations department before placing any image other than a photo on your page.
  • Images containing text may only be used when that text is absolutely necessary and the information cannot be conveyed in any other way. For example, an image of a logo which contains text is acceptable, because the color, style and placement of the text are integral to the logo being understood.
  • All images must have an image description which describes the content of the image and conveys all of the information of contained within the image to the site visitor. If the image contains structured data of any kind such as headings, lists, dates, times, locations or tabular data, this information cannot be properly structured within an image description tag. Instead of using the image, please place the text content on the page.

Accessible Hyperlinks

Accessible Video

All video that appears on the MJC website must be closed-captioned for the hearing impaired. Only use properly closed-captioned videos on the website. Using the YouTube Embed Component available to you in MJC's Modern Campus CMS will ensure that the video is embedded with captions properly enabled. 

Below is an example of a properly closed captioned video.

Manufacturing Programs at MJC

This is an example of an accessible and properly captioned video.

Accessible Lists

Lists are a good way to convey several short pieces of information, but creating lists manually by inserting a bullet character or copying and pasting from another program will not produce accessible lists. Using the Bullet List and Numbered List tools within Modern Campus CMS will ensure that site visitors who rely on a screen reader and keyboard navigation can explore your list content in a way that's easy to use and easy to understand.

Accessible Tables

Creating completely accessible tables is technically complex. Before creating a table, consider if you could deliver the information using a combination of nested headings and lists. Avoid using tables unless it is the only possible way to convey the information.

If you must use a table on your page, please contact your web developer for assistance with creating accessible tables. 

Accessible Documents

Placing content on a web page is nearly always preferable to linking to a PDF or Microsoft Office document because it's the easiest way to ensure that your content is accessible to all users. If you must produce other document formats for public consumption, please familiarize yourself with how to make those documents accessible.

Accessible Document Training

We strongly recommend completing at least the first four modules of the Accessible Document Training offered by WebAIM. This training is offered to all California Community College employees for free through the Vision Resource Center.

Sign Up for Accessible Document Training for Free

Accessible Document Reference Resources

Guidelines for Usage of Images Within Documents

  • Graphics that contain tabular data should be created as a table in the document, never as an image or screen shot. Tables must have well-defined descriptive headers on both rows and columns.
  • Infographics should be kept as simple as possible and embedded as an individual graphic, not merged with other infographics. Simple infographics should include alternative text containing the entirety of the data contained within the infographic.
  • Infographics that must be more complex because they merge multiple sets of data should be paired with a paragraph on the page which outlines and describes significant trends displayed within the infographic.
  • In all other cases, the creator should consult with MJC's web developer or another accessibility expert to ensure that the content is accessible.