Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) was introduced in 2005. Over the past eight years, businesses and organizations in Ontario have been required to change certain practices at their physical locations to assist people with disabilities.

Standards Compliance

All pages on this site are WCAG AAA approved, complying with all priority 1, 2, and 3 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. As with the Bobby guidelines, many of the WCAG guidelines are vague and/or subjective and cannot be tested automatically. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance. All pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, there is some room for subjective evaluation here; we have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.

Navigation aids

All pages on this site include a consistent set of global navigation links.

Links

Many links (including navigation links) have title attributes, which describe the link in greater detail, unless the text of the link already fully describes the target. Wherever possible, links are written to make sense out of context. Many screen readers (JAWS, NVDA, Windows Eyes and VoiceOver for MAC) can extract the list of links on a page and allow the user to browse the list, separately from the page. Link text is never duplicated; two links with the same link text always point to the same address. There are no javascript: pseudo-links. All links can be followed in any browser, even if scripting is turned off. All links to external sources will open in a new window.

Images

All content images used in this site include ALT attributes.

Visual design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified text size option in visual browsers. A convenient on-board text size modification tool has been incorporated into the design of the website. This tool uses css to modify the text size for the entire site. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.