The New York Women’s Foundation is fully committed to inclusion of its web visitors and women and gender-expansive leaders with disabilities. We are taking proactive steps to ensure that our online experiences adhere to the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG 2.1 AA.
By auditing our website and making a commitment to the design of future implementations with these guidelines in mind, The New York Women’s Foundation anticipates that in the future, our web content will be significantly more accessible to users of all abilities.
We are in the process of establishing internal best practices for web accessibility across our developmental teams, including providing alternative text for images, labeled form fields, maintaining captions for multimedia content, color usage, and clear color contrast, among other crucial accessibility considerations across our website.
As of October 2022, we have finished a substantial accessibility audit of our main website. As we began to fix those areas of inaccessibility, we decided to have an independent audit conducted by a premier third-party accessibility consulting firm, Accessibility Partners. Currently, this company is using a three-prong approach to testing: skilled accessibility testers with and without disabilities, coupled with assistive technologies and accessibility testing tools. To ensure that The New York Women’s Foundation is receiving the most accurate results with respect to accessibility, their test engineers use a process that leverages the right combination of testers and assistive technologies.
The team utilized assistive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnification, and voice recognition software to evaluate the recommended technology solutions from the actual perspective of those with disabilities. This methodology provides firsthand knowledge when engaging assistive technology devices for testing.
We are committed to implementing their accessibility recommendations and weaving accessibility into our future design processes. While it is impossible to have accessible solutions immediately, we are operating with urgency, and based on our revised design methodologies, new content will have accessibility factored in from the onset.
Please contact us by emailing communications@nywf.org if you would like to discuss our process plan further.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including accommodations for blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these. The guidelines also provide some accommodation for learning disabilities and cognitive limitations; but will not address every user need for people with these disabilities.
These guidelines address accessibility of web content on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Following these guidelines will also often make Web content more usable to users in general. Working with Accessibility Partners, The New York Women’s Foundation has decided to use the industry-wide level AA as our standard to adhere to for attainable compliance.
If you have difficulty accessing our products via assistive technology, please contact us at communications@nywf.org so that we can make the information available to you.
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