Website Accessibility

Introduction

The Lexington, Massachusetts web team has 4 goals - to provide:

  • Usability for all website visitors
  • Ease of maintenance and enhancement
  • Support for all web-capable devices
  • A polished, professional website that reflects Lexington's uniqueness

Our first goal is accessibility - enabling all of our website visitors to get the information they need.

We are actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our website, guided by the WCAG 2.1 AA standard.

Our Accessibility Process

Here are some of the processes we follow to make our website accessible:

  • Our images have alternate text.
  • We minimize the amount of text that is contained in images.
  • Our pages use headings to help navigation.
  • Hyperlinks are placed on text that indicates where the link goes, for ease of navigation.
  • We use mainly sans serif fonts and set minimum font sizes to improve readability.
  • Our pages are formatted to display correctly when a larger font size is selected.
  • We minimize the amount of movement which takes place on our pages to help people focus.
  • We use plain language and short sentences to assist people:
    • with cognitive or reading difficulties
    • whose first language is not English
    • who use Google translate to get a more accurate translation
  • We ensure that text has a high contrast to its background.
  • We do not rely solely on color to emphasize text or make differentiations.

Current Accessibility Projects

Current projects to increase website accessibility include:

Auditing Our PDFs

  • Replacing PDFs which contain scanned images of text with actual text.
  • Ensuring that PDFs contain usable headings.
  • Ensuring that the reading order in PDFs is correct.
  • Replacing PDFs with webpages when it improves findability and/or accessibility.

Using Webaim's Wave Tool to Audit Webpages

  • Working with our website vendor to resolve site-wide contrast problems
  • Educating our web team on resolving problems found on individual pages

Creating New Policies & Procedures for Audio Content

  • Investigating transcription and captioning options
  • Recommending the use of slideshows with captions instead of videos where possible

Support for Accessibility Issues

If you find that you have difficulty accessing anything on our website, please contact the Lexington Webmaster by email form or at 781-698-4615. We will work with you to:

  • Get you the information you need in a format you can use
  • Find a website-wide solution for the problem