Compliance with Web Standards for Accessibility

The MSU Department of Chemistry -- in agreement with MSU Accessibility Guidelines, US Federal "Section 508" Requirements, and our desire to serve all of our web site visitors -- is committed to achieving a high level of accessibility for each of our web pages.

We make assessments of each web page's accessibility by using one or more of several on-line services:

As part of ensuring the accessibility of a web page is having valid markup coding, we also validate the markup (including HTML syntax and style sheets) using several on-line services:

Once we have tested, repaired, and validated a web page we keep track of the levels of compliance by marking the page in the bottom left corner of its footer. The marker is in the form "|aaa|bbb|ccc|ddd|". The four fields may, individually, be null or may contain characters with the significance:

aaa - represents compliance with HTML standards by showing the highest HTML version for which the page has been validated (e.g., "4.01");
bbb - represents compliance with Cascading Style Sheet standards by showing the string "CSS" if compliant;
ccc - represents compliance with US Federal "Section 508" accessibility requirements by showing the string "508" if compliant; and
ddd - represents compliance with WAI Web Content Accessibility Guidelines by showing the string "A" or "AA" or "AAA" according to the conformance level.

For example, the alternate text-only version of our home page at the URL http://www.chemistry.msu.edu/index_text-only.shtml contains the marker "|4.01|CSS|508|AAA|" indicating that it is compliant with all of the standards and that we feel it achieves the highest conformance level with respect to the accessibility guidelines.

We expect the vast majority of our pages will contain the marker (once they are tested, repaired, and validated) "|4.01|CSS|508|A|" indicating that they are compliant with all of the standards and they achieve the basic level of conformance with respect to the accessibility guidelines. Typically, these pages achieve the AA, or even the AAA, level of conformance but we will leave them marked for the A level until this is independently verified.

Some pages can not be validated -- typically these are *.asp pages or pages requiring a user-login for access. Even so, the same coding practices are used with these pages as with our compliant pages to ensure that all of our pages achieve a high level of accessibility.