Accessibility & Usability

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Future and Ongoing Plans

Following 2024 Cascade User Conference, look into:
- Prompt editors for real alt tag values when ever image name is used, ex: photo.jpg
- Check for improper use of internal cascade links or repeated https://https:// that can result form copy/paste usage.
Continue educating Cascade users on how and why accessibility needs to considered when adding content to their websites. (alt tags, Heading tags, descriptive link text, etc.) (This will be an ongoing endless process)

What's been done
Due to to requests, I'll try to list more minor/granular changes and fixes going forward in addition to larger changes.

2024 - Fall - Updated blue links in normal body text from the bootstrap deafualt of #0d6efd to #025ee8. This increases the contrast when the link text is used on top of our light gray or light blue elements. Testing done with WebAIM's Link Contrast Checker. Hover and active states set to red dotted underline to contrast blue solid underline used for link and visited states. Focus state left at default.
2024 - Stripping empty & improper tags from WYSIWYG editing fields. Especially good for empty link fragments and empty span tags
2024 - Force loading="lazy" to be added to images placed in WYSIWYG editing fields.
2024 - Force conversion of deprecated tag <b> to <strong>
2024 - Removed the option for users to add H1 and force a single page instance, even if hidden offscreen.
2024 - Begin wider use of WEBP image format to improve load times.
2024 - Refine link text used on image based slides so that the links are more descriptive for screen readers (W3C).
2024 - Implement a text overlay option for the optional short but full width page header images as users keep adding text to header images. Even with alt tags, text in images is not ideal.
2024 - Hide some duplicate links from screen readers with:
- aria-hidden="true"
- tabindex="-1"
In conjunction with Bootstrap 5 implementations, increase use of ARIA.
Continue move towards a standardized grid-template use to replace floated divs used in the past. Testing Bootstrap 5 currently with smaller projects
2023 - Updated "DOCTYPE" for HTML 5 and removed xml declaration. Rollout sitewide with next full republishing.
2023 - Specific JS files now set to "defer" to improve load times.
2023 - Lazy loading added to select image content to improve load times. Will add to other content pages going for when possible.
2023 - GDPR banner updated.
2022-23 - Started working/testing with Bootstrap for smaller projects.
2021 - Base font size increased to roughly 17 pixels, max page width for larger screens widened to 1,300 pixels. Browser based zoom can provide greater control.
2017 - Rolled out new templates with improved responsive design.
2015 - Marketing has started captioning promotional videos on YouTube.
2013 - began rollout of responsive template allowing greater accessibility across devices.
The base template are made to comply with Level AA before implementation so they start out compliant.
Alt tags are used everywhere possible. Page decoration and unnecessary images receive empty alt tags. Cascade enforces alt tags when added using the WYSIWYG options, but users still need provide meaningful text equivalents.
Slides changed to use text overlay rather than text as part of the image.
2009 - Table based layouts removed, with the fall template rollout.
Tab option "skip to content" added.
Web forms carry labels.
Whenever possible documents are posted as PDF files, the industry standard archiving format of choice. Accessibility may not be ideal, but the documents can be accessed by the majority of site users unlike random formats (cws, wpf, docx, xls, etc.). Scanned files must have OCR applied whenever possible.
Use of JS is kept to a minimum.
Adobe Flash elements removed sitewide.