Steven J Hagen

***** Drafting this still *****

Mind mapping it

Policy statement
The City of "X" believes that part of it main services to their citizens is to provide quality and well defined information to all of it citizens that would request, or benefit from that information. Part of that believe is to ensure that citizens who are disabled or have special needs are able to consume most of the information that we provide on the web. To that concern the "website name" has some made several goals in the design of the pages that we provide.

Our goal is to have graded browser support and be Browser Class "A" complainant, to write content that is semantically correct and follows the best practices that is set by W3C. We also desire to have the content that we provide to be within the structure that the "Rehabilitation Act" Section 508 (29 U.S.C. ‘ 794d) set forth to ensure accessibility.

Defining Trems
Graded Browser Support -- In the first 10 years of professional web development, back in the early ‘90s, browser support was binary: Do you — or don’t you — support a given browser? When the answer was “No”, user access to the site was often actively prevented. By contrast, in modern web development we must support all browsers. Choosing to exclude a segment of users is inappropriate, and, with a “Graded Browser Support” strategy, unnecessary. Graded Browser Support offers two fundamental ideas: A broader and more reasonable definition of “support.” The notion of “grades” of support.

Semantic Web -- The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. It is a collaborative effort led by W3C with participation from a large number of researchers and industrial partners. It is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), which integrates a variety of applications using XML for syntax and URIs for naming.

Accessibility -- the ability to view web pages on different browsers and multiple platforms; especially concerns individuals with disabilities — that they have access to and be able to use information and data in a manner comparable to individuals without disabilities

references
http://www.section508.gov
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html
http://www.mcgill.ca/help/webpublishing/glossary/

Sample Accessibility Policies

Sample 1 is from Aurora, Colorado I took it of Nov 6, 2008

Accessibility
The City of Aurora is committed to providing information to all of its citizens and visitors. The AuroraGov.org web site is working toward w3c.org/WCI Level A compliance. Our project plan is for the compliance to be attained. We are currently working on an alternative navigation bar that does not rely on javascript. Our goal is to build a menu system that will produce a dynamically generated Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) controlled menu system that would be at least Level A compliant. Once that project is completed, our development plan is to rebuild the page layouts to use Cascading Style Sheets for the page’s main structure and tables will be used in the content/article section of the page. The table used in the content will be WCI Level A compliant. The Web Content Management System(WCMS) used for the AuroraGov.org’s site converts Microsoft Word Documents into HTML content using a dynamic conversion template. To make the AuroraGov.org site Level AA compliant, the dynamic conversion template will need to be re-engineered and will take some development time. Our future goal is to analyze each piece of content that is being provided on the site and to assure Level AA compliance.

If you are using any browsers with assistant software, please make comments on our site using the contact us link. Your comments will help us make the site more accessible to all of our site visitors.
If you encounter pages that do not provide enough accessibility, please contact Access Aurora