MATRIX Accessibility Policy

The following policy was officially adopted by MATRIX - Center for Humane Arts, Sciences, and Social Services Online, in June of 2004.

As a center devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research, MATRIX recognizes its responsibility to develop internet pages and services that are usable by all people, including those with disabilities. MATRIX believes that the power of the web is in its universality, and that access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. To realize this goal, MATRIX will address the needs of people with disabilities during all phases of site planning, development, and application. MATRIX will also attempt to make their pages as universally acceptable as possible. Steps towards these goals include,

  • Maintaining 508 compliance. MATRIX site pages, and pages developed by MATRIX will attempt to be Section 508 approved, complying with all the US Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines;
  • Having all pages validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. This makes certain that all pages created by MATRIX follow W3C Recommendations and standards;
  • All pages created by MATRIX use structured semantic markup;
  • All important content images on MATRIX designed sites will include descriptive ALT attributes;
  • All MATRIX designed pages will use Cascading Style Sheets for visual layout, and will structure the pages in such a way, in which content is still readable for devices that do not support style sheets.
  • The number of links contain title attributes, which describe the purpose of the link in fuller detail, if the link is found to not be descriptive enough.

Due to the lack of feasibility in doing so, MATRIX DOES NOT attempt to make pages useable by old or out-dated browsers, e.g. Netscape Navigator 4.0, which can be easily updated. But MATRIX DOES attempt to make information contained on pages as readable as possible by out-dated browsers.

Accessibility services:

  • W3C Markup validation serivice: a free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.
  • W3C CSS validation service : a free service that checks Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in (X)HTML documents or standalone for conformance to W3C recommendations.
  • Cynthia Says section 508 compliance service: a web content accessibility validation solution, it is designed to identify errors in design related to Section 508 standards and the WCAG guidelines.