Usage Examples

Mary also knows that if her image had contained words, she would have had to adhere to the Contrast rule of the RANCH rules, as well as other WCAG2.0 guidelines (1.4.3, 1.4.5, and possibly others). If there were text on the image, scaling (magnification) would also need to be considered. The WAVE tool would not have correctly informed her of these contrast and scaling concerns, so she could not rely solely on the WAVE tool for compliance.

Dealing with drop down menus

Mary is using a website framework provided by a third party hosting company. She doesn't totally understand AJAX and ARIA, but she knows she has to have her website accessible to keyboard navigation.

She has used the WAVE tool, and her website passes with just a few warnings. She feels fairly confident that her architecture is good.

Even with the WAVE tool reporting no accessibility errors, she knows her navigation still may be a problem. Mary conducts the simplest test she can to see if her navigation is keyboard accessible: she visits her webpage and tries to navigate the menu bar with the keyboard.

Mary finds that, while she is able to navigate the top-level menu items by way of the TAB key, she is not able to select any of the sub-menu items. Because large portions of her website are not navigable (N is for Navigation), she knows that her site is not Operable, one of the core principles of accessibility. She understands that even though her website passes the WAVE tool, it is not, in fact, accessible.

Mary contacts her hosting company to express the concern and begins working on a left-hand navigation pane to work around the navigation limitations of her website.

Dealing with PDFs

Mary's school website has several PDF attachments. She has determined that the simplest way to correct these issues will be to click through each PDF, open the PDF, and visually determine accessibility.

She goes to the pages she knows has PDFs and clicks on several. She finds that in the first few she is able to select text with no problem, and as she glances through the PDFs, notices that none have any large images that are not well described. She remembers that PDFs must meet all of the RANCH rules, so she checks for scalability, contrast and to ensure that images have screen reader equivalent explanations.

She does hit a run of bad luck. Several of the old school board meeting minute PDFs were scanned to PDF from hardcopies. These scanned PDFs were not passed through any optical character recognition processing and so do not have any text-based components that are screen reader compatible. As such, these PDFs are not accessible.

She decides the best thing to do is contact the clerk and see if the clerk still has the original digital copies. If so, she plans to save those as PDF (electronically) to ensure the PDF is screen reader compatible. She also plans to determine how many minutes the clerk and board feel are appropriate to store so she can minimize the amount of conversion work she needs to do by simply taking down older minutes.

Dealing with videos

Mary's school website has posted several videos of performances from skits and the orchestra. There is also the Superintendent's "Welcome Back to School" video addressing the community.

Mary knows from the RANCH rules that these Helpers need to be addressed. She refers to the WCAG rules and learns that in order to be WCAG2.0aa compliant, videos need closed captioning.

After talking to the superintendent, Mary decides to pull all of these performances off of the website to avoid the work of adding closed captioning. The superintendent did ask Mary to add closed captioning to the Welcome Back video that the superintendent released earlier in the year. Mary uses YouTube's closed captioning tools to add the captions.