accessibility concerns and issues

The Canadian Association for Community Living is involved in various aspects of the disability community across Canada, and as such, feels that access to the information provided on this web site is vital to our membership and affiliated partners. With this in mind, CACL and those responsible for its development, upkeep and maintenance try to provide full access to all of CACL's online resources, regardless of each individual's physical, intellectual or cognizent abilitities, or the availability of assistive devices and technologies.

We have kept the following in mind while creating this web site:

Compliance with International Standards

This web site has been constructed using standards-compliant XHTML, ASP and CSS. The development team has endeavored to follow the guidelines set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium www.w3.org

Coding is checked for compliance using the validation tools provided at www.w3.org as well as the University of Toronto's Adaptive Technology Resource Centre.

Informational Hierarchy

Elements and infomation on this web site are organized using appropriate hierarchial tags. For example, the main headline of each page is defined by the H1 tag, subsequent sub-headings use H2, and so forth.

Components such as menus and other options have been organized in such a way as to make browsing this web site as efficient and simple as possible.

Additional Text

Images used throughout this website are accompanied by alternate text (ALT tags) for descriptive purposes. In instances where an image is used to represent text, the ALT tag contains the equivalent wording. Purely decorative images are named appropriately and/or accompanied by null ALT tags.

Visual Considerations

The majority of visual formatting is performed using Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). For browsers or devices which do not support CSS, all content is still readable and no critical elements are lost.

Colour choices for text and images have been selected to try to maximize contrast and make things easier to see on a variety of viewing devices – CRT monitor, LCD screen, handheld & mobile devices, etc.

Visual contrast is checked using colour variation simulators available at www.Vischeck.com