Web Accessibility
Web accessibility is a practice of "Inclusive Design" that ensures people with various disabilities are able to fully access and interact with websites. The goal is for all users to be able to perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with a website regardless of any physical or situational disability.
Web Accessibility Addresses:
- Visual: Blindness, low vision, color-blindness, light sensitivity
- Auditory: Deafness, hearing impairments
- Motor: Inability to use a mouse, slow response time, limited fine motor control
- Cognitive: Developmental disabilities, learning difficulties, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information
Having an awareness of these various needs, and understanding the difficulties that people with disabilities experience on the web is the first step to implementing web accessibility. United Heritage is committed to supporting usability and diversity with its public websites, by including and learning from people with disabilities in the design of web content. Utilizing existing web standards and robust capabilities of modern browsers, we are able to support assistive technologies (screen readers) and offer flexible content that can adapt as a user has needs.
New United Heritage Web Accessibility features:
- Font Size control that allows users to increase the font size up to 200%
- Increased Contrast control that achieves a minimum contrast ratio (4.5:1) for elements that contain text
- Increased Spacing control that increases the text line height, letter spacing, word spacing, and spacing following paragraphs
- Dark Mode color theme that automatically detects if the user has enabled a dark mode preference (in the browser or OS), and if no preference is detected, a control to manually enable if desired
- Keyboard Navigation enhancements throughout all pages that enable visual styles and interaction using a keyboard (the same as with a mouse)
- Skip to Main Content option for keyboard navigation, to bypass common menu items and access main page content more quickly
- Assistive Technology enhancements throughout all pages to improve the ability for screen readers to navigate and communicate website content to the user
- Persistent Accessibility settings that are retained/remembered in the browser across page navigation