Web Accessibility

We are dedicated to making our website friendly for all of our users. We want you to know that we're doing our utmost to meet or exceed legal standards for users with disabilities and we've tested our pages with many types of assistive software on various browsers and platforms.

Compliant with Federal, State, and WCAG guidelines

We are doing our best to conform with the requirements of Federal Section 508, Illinois Information Technology Accessibility Act (IITAA) 1.0 and Level AA of W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. This means that we have worked really hard to make this site useable in a timely, accurate and efficient manner by people with limited or no vision, people with hearing loss or who are deaf, and to people with limited or no manual reach, strength, or manipulation.

Verified for Accessibility

We test our pages to make sure they're accessible using the Functional Accessibility Evaluator 1.1 (FAE), JAWS 12.0, W3C Markup Validator, VoiceOver (OS X 10.6), and by simply making sure the site can be navigated and manipulated from the keyboard. We have optimized our use of headings and sub-headings so that our pages clearly convey their structure for linearized page reading. And, just to be sure, we frequently inspect our source code to make sure it will work with current and anticipated assistive technologies.

A Consistent Experience Across Multiple Web Browsers, Platforms, and Mobile Devices

We use valid, standard web programming code in order to ensure that our pages can be viewed on a variety of devices and will work with future assistive technologies. We've made sure they're compatible with (and will display properly on) desktop and mobile devices running Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox 8+, Chrome, Safari v5, Opera v11+, Android, and Apple iOS.

Always Improving

Ultimately, accessibility is a usability principle. On our website, we've made it easier for you to find the information you need and to get done what you need to get done without difficulty -- whether you are using assistive technology or not. We rigorously assess our website through interactive usability evaluations with members of the campus community and we have done our best to make our website's menus consistent, its tools logical, and its over-all look & feel engaging. Accessibility & usability, however, are moving targets. If you experience problems using this site, we want to know about it. Please contact the CITES Webmaster and let us know how we can improve.

A special thanks to: