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Built for Everyone: Our Commitment to an Accessible Website

Every page on this site is built for the people who keep schools running, and that includes people who use screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnification, captions or high-contrast settings. Here's what we do to make the site usable for everyone, how we test it, and how you can tell us when we've missed something.

Why it matters to us

Our members work in every corner of school operations: data, assessment, compliance, technology, HR, curriculum and more. Some of them rely on assistive technology every day. If a page can't be read by a screen reader, can't be used without a mouse, or puts pale gray text on a white background, it isn't doing its job.

We're a volunteer-run non-profit, not a company with a web team, so we can't promise perfection. What we can promise is that accessibility is part of how we build and check every page, not something we bolt on later.

The standard we aim for

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA. It's the same standard the U.S. Department of Justice adopted in its 2024 ADA Title II rule for the websites of state and local governments, which includes public school districts.

In plain English, Level AA means things like:

  • text that has enough contrast with its background to be read comfortably;
  • everything works with a keyboard alone, and you can always see where you are on the page;
  • images have text alternatives, and headings and links make sense when read aloud;
  • pages still work when you zoom in or read on a phone.

The full technical standard is published by the W3C: WCAG 2.1.

How we test each page

When we build or update a page, we check it in four ways:

  1. An automated scan with WAVE. WAVE, from WebAIM at Utah State University, checks a page for missing text alternatives, low contrast, heading structure, form labels and other common problems. We aim for zero errors and zero contrast errors.
  2. Color contrast checks. Every text color in our design is measured against WCAG's minimums: 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text and icons. We use the WebAIM Contrast Checker to confirm them.
  3. Keyboard-only checks. We put the mouse away and move through the page with the Tab key to make sure menus, buttons and links can be reached in a sensible order, with a visible focus outline. WebAIM's keyboard accessibility guide explains what we look for.
  4. Fix once, fix everywhere. Most of our pages share one style sheet. When we find a problem, we fix it there, so the fix reaches every page that uses it. Each change is logged, tested on the live site and re-checked with WAVE afterwards.

A recent example

In November 2026, a WAVE scan of our home page found 11 contrast errors, all coming from the pop-up accessibility menu built into our website software. The fix took three small changes to our shared style sheet, each tested and re-checked. The home page now has a clean WAVE report (zero errors, zero contrast errors, zero alerts), and because the menu appears everywhere, the fix reached every page on the site.

Tools you can use in your district

If your district is working on accessibility too, these are the free resources we rely on:

For software that helps districts manage ADA and Office for Civil Rights requirements, see our ADA / OCR Compliance systems category.

What we're still working on

We'd rather be honest than claim we're finished. These are the areas where you're most likely to run into problems:

  • Older pages. Some of our earliest pages were built before our current design standards. We're bringing them up to date one at a time.
  • Vendor logos and screenshots. Images supplied by software companies may contain text that is small or low in contrast. We add text descriptions, but we can't always change the image itself.
  • PDFs and downloads. Some documents, especially ones published by other organizations, aren't fully accessible.
  • Embedded videos and third-party content. Captions and players on videos hosted elsewhere, and parts of pages produced by plugins, are controlled by those providers.

If one of these gets in your way, please tell us. We can often provide the same information another way.

Found a problem? Tell us

If you find a page that's hard to use, or that doesn't meet the standard described here, please let us know through our Contact page. It helps if you include:

  • the address (URL) of the page;
  • what you were trying to do and what went wrong;
  • the device, browser and any assistive technology you were using (for example, a screen reader or magnifier).

A volunteer will read every report. We'll let you know we received it, and we'll either fix the problem or explain what we can do and get you the information in another way.