One of the oldest community colleges in California, MJC has two main campuses in the city of Modesto and serves more than 18,000 day and evening students each semester.
Located near the city of Sonora in the wooded Sierra Nevada foothills, Columbia College is a primary resource of adult learning for residents throughout the Mother Lode region.
Yosemite Community College District is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are continually revising our websites (including mjc.edu and gocolumbia.edu) to make our websites more accessible and have adopted the WCAG 2.1 AA standard for accessibility. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone and applying the relevant accessibility standards. Please let us know if you encounter accessibility barriers on YCCD websites or any of our vendor sites.
Web content designed with accessibility in mind is built upon the foundational principle that the site should be easy to navigate, and that content should be easy to understand because it has a strong sense of context. These are principles that are important to all visitors to our website, not just those with disabilities.
YCCD has a responsibility to serve all of our community. Creating accessible content for the web ensures that our students who are deaf, blind and vision impaired or have learning, cognitive or motor disabilities have the same access to services and instruction as the rest of our students.
Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 establishes guidelines that all Information and communications technology must be accessible to all people with disabilities and must be compatible with assistive technologies that make it easier to access that communication. Adhering to the accessibility guidelines below meets our legal obligation by making sure that your page is compatible with those technologies.
Certain vision impairments, learning disabilities and cognitive differences make some fonts, font sizes, and font colors significantly easier to read than others. YCCD's website is equipped with stylesheets that make it very easy to ensure that your text is styled in an accessible way. All you have to do is leave it alone. If you don't change the font, style or color, your text will be appropriately styled for accessibility.
It's important to contain the information within your page in a logical structure of headings. Heading 1 is built into the structure of the YCCD template. It contains the top-level information about the page. The Subheading for a page is Heading 2. Use headings 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in a nested, hierarchical order to organize your information. For example, several Heading 5 tags can appear under a Heading 4, but a Heading 5 will never appear immediately under a Heading 3.
Never use heading styles for emphasis. We have numerous components and snippets available to emphasize important content, and bold and italic styles can be used sparingly.
Blind and vision-impaired students may use screen readers to read them the contents of websites. In other cases, they may use technologies that increase the font size or contrast of web content. Those visitors may not have access to information contained within images. Special care must be used when placing images on a page to ensure that any information conveyed by those images is available to all site visitors.
All video that appears on YCCD websites must be closed-captioned for the hearing impaired. Only use properly closed-captioned videos on the website. Using the YouTube Embed Component available to you in YCCD's Modern Campus CMS will ensure that the video is embedded with captions properly enabled.
Below is an example of a properly closed captioned video.
Lists are a good way to convey several short pieces of information, but creating lists manually by inserting a bullet character or copying and pasting from another program will not produce accessible lists. Using the Bullet List and Numbered List tools within Modern Campus CMS will ensure that site visitors who rely on a screen reader and keyboard navigation can explore your list content in a way that's easy to use and easy to understand.
Creating completely accessible tables is technically complex. Before creating a table, consider if you could deliver the information using a combination of nested headings and lists. Avoid using tables unless it is the only possible way to convey the information.
If you must use a table on your page, please contact your web developer for assistance with creating accessible tables.
Placing content on a web page is nearly always preferable to linking to a PDF or Microsoft Office document because it's the easiest way to ensure that your content is accessible to all users. If you must produce other document formats for public consumption, please familiarize yourself with how to make those documents accessible.
We strongly recommend completing at least the first four modules of the Accessible Document Training offered by WebAIM. This training is offered to all California Community College employees for free through the Vision Resource Center.
Sign Up for Accessible Document Training for Free
