Accessibility and Web Standards

Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 requires that all Federal agencies' website content, along with the website content of those organizations they sponsor, be accessible to those with disabilities.

We follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) formulated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which are universally accepted standard for website accessibility. Websites are considered to have earned one of three ratings, "A", "AA" or "AAA," "AAA" being the most stringent.

All web pages at http://www.ectacenter.org have achieved the following:

• Validated Section 508 Standards
• Compliance with WCAG 2.0 detailed at http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/
• Met "AA" level of the above guidelines
  
• Evaluated to be accessibility error-free with the WAVE Accessibility Evaluation Tool
  
• Web content creation and delivery relies on the following technologies : XHTML (1.0 Transitional), ASP, ColdFusion, CSS, PNG, PDF, Flash, MySQL, and JavaScript

The following links may provide some further information about Web site accessibility that you will find helpful.

• My web my way
• Speech output programs: Browsealoud and Textic

W3C has also developed web standards, for various Web programming and markup languages. The Web standards help ensure Web pages display and work the same for everyone. All Web pages at http://www.ectacenter.org complies with these standards as explained below.

• XHTML 1.0 Transitional - Passed by W3C Markup Validation Service
  
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - Passed by W3C CSS Validation Service