ACUE Accessibility Statement

I. General Summary

ACUE is committed to providing course experiences that are accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability.

We are actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our courses and other offerings, and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines.

We welcome persons with disabilities and can make reasonable accommodations upon request. If you need specific accommodations, please contact us via email at support@acue.org.

II. Guidelines and Standards

ACUE courses aim to conform to level A or level AA of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0.

These guidelines explain how to make ACUE’s courses and web site content more accessible for people with disabilities. Conformance with these guidelines will serve to enhance the end user experience.

ACUE’s courses have been built in environments that use code compliant with W3C standards for HTML and CSS. These environments display correctly in current web browsers and using standards-compliant HTML and CSS code means any future browsers will also display them correctly.

We are continually seeking out solutions that will bring all areas of the site up to the same level of overall web accessibility. In the meantime, should you experience any difficulty in accessing a course environment, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

III. Instructure Canvas

The ACUE course platform and general user experiences are almost solely supported through Canvas, a third-party Learning Management System (LMS) environment, developed by Instructure.

WebAIM.org, a third-party authority in web accessibility, has evaluated the Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) by Instructure and certifies it to be substantially conformant with Level A and Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0. A representative sample of system views was evaluated for accessibility. This sample included course pages, calendars, quizzes, and communication tools.

Instructure has additionally provided a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), accessible at https://www.canvaslms.com/accessibility. This VPAT is a tool that administrators and decision-makers can use to evaluate Canvas’ conformance with the WCAG 2.0 standards, level AA.

IV. ACUE Content

ACUE’s course content is housed within the Canvas platform. Great efforts have been taken, and will continue, towards supporting accessibility of course content components.

Multimedia elements: documents, images, video and audio files
ACUE either provides or is in process to provide all multimedia elements—embedded or downloadable—in an accessible format, including but not limited to the following:

• Images and non-text content: Alternative and short descriptive texts will be available for all multimedia and non-text content.
  
  
• File size: All videos and multimedia will offer a size indication, so that downloading time can be estimated.
  
  
• Video: If software is required to play embedded videos, a download link will be posted. All videos will be presented through a third-party player that enables the user to play, pause, stop, forward and rewind the video. Live webcasts will be archived after broadcasting to be available for a later viewing. No flashing content will be provided. ACUE either provides or plans to provide captions, transcripts, and/or audio descriptions (as separate videos) for each video.
  
  
• Documents: All document files (e.g., Word, PDF) will use document structure elements such as styles, headings or tags to provide a hidden, structured textual representation for screen readers.
  
  Presentation of Content and Layout
  ACUE either provides or plans to provide structured content, making it possible to scan through a document and giving air to long texts, including but not limited to the following:
  
  
• Content: Semantic markup will be used to delineate titles, subtitles, and headers of different levels. ACUE strives to provide graphics for complex content.
  
  
• Layout: Layout tables are avoided where possible.
  
  
• Navigation: ACUE also strives to offer a clear navigation structure that helps users find the desired content more quickly.
  
  
• Links: ACUE either provides or plans to provide links containing title attributes which describe destination content and make sense out of context.