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Web & Digital Content Accessibility

JMU Libraries is committed to digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We continually work to ensure our website and digital resources are fully accessible to all users and compatible with assistive technologies.

Standards

As part of a public university in the state of Virginia, JMU Libraries is required to comply with Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and regulations set forth by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. Accordingly, JMU Libraries uses WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines as a baseline for determining web and digital accessibility.

Compliance

To fulfill its commitment to accessibility, regular automated testing of our website alerts Libraries staff to accessibility issues, broken links, and other web governance issues. Libraries staff also manually test web content to ensure compatibility with the following technologies.

  • Desktop and mobile devices
  • Browsers: Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari
  • Keyboard, mouse, and touch navigation
  • Assistive Technologies: JAWS, Narrator, NVDA, Orca, Voice Control, and VoiceOver
  • PDFs: WCAG and PDF/UA compliant

Accessibility Checkers & Testing Tools

Many applications are available to help improve digital accessibility and check WCAG conformance. However, it’s important to note that no application can guarantee compliance (regardless of developer claims to the contrary). Manual testing and remediation by someone familiar with digital accessibility, WCAG, and assistive technologies is necessary to ensure compliance.

The following applications are recommended tools for digital accessibility testing.

  • ANDI
    A web browser bookmarklet that’s helpful for assessing HTML markup without directly looking at code. More informative and less automated than other applications.
  • axe DevTools (Chrome, Edge, Firefox)
    A web browser extension that integrates into DevTools. The free version provides automated full-page checking and helpful contextual links. The premium version adds partial page checking and additional guided tests. Not available for Safari.
  • Color Contrast Analyzer
    A native application for Windows and Mac that provides color-picker contrast checking of two different colors.
  • PAC PDF Checker
    A native application for Windows that provides more comprehensive and intuitive accessibility checking of PDFs than Adobe Acrobat.
  • VeraPDF
    An open-source PDF accessibility checker for Windows, Mac and Linux. A command line tools is available for more advanced users.
  • WAVE
    A free web browser extension that provides automated full-page checking. Not available for Safari.