Accessibility

St. Cloud Area School District 742 is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability. We are actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our website and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines.

This website endeavors to comply with best practices and standards as defined by Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act and level AA of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible for people with disabilities. Conformance with these guidelines will help make the web more user-friendly for all people.

All site pages are being run through a W3C compliant validation product, currently Blackboard Ally, to monitor compliancy to WCAG guidelines. We will continue to test the site to make sure that all content on the site is accessible to all visitors. We will also continue to work to improve the accessibility standards of our website.

Some documents on this website are produced in portable document format (PDF). In order to improve viewing these files, please download the latest version of Adobe Reader, which is available for free at the Adobe web site. Older publications in PDF format that were crafted solely for printing are posted for archival purposes and may be not be accessible. We are continually seeking solutions that will bring all areas of the site up to the same level of overall web accessibility.

If you are unable to access any page(s) or documents on our site, please email communications@isd742.org or call 320-370-8115 with detailed information on the location of the page or document you were attempting to access. Be sure to provide us with your name and contact information so that we may provide you with the information in another format.

Please note that some pages on this website contain links to third-party sites that are outside of our control and may not comply with accessibility standards.

Web Accessibility Plan

District 742 is committed to ensuring that digital communications for district-sponsored programs, events and activities are accessible to district students, staff, families and community members with disabilities. District 742 utilizes Blackboard as a content management system for creation and uploading of online content for our website. Utilizing this system, Blackboard maintains certain aspects of our accessibility compliance.

Improvements Made to Date:

January 2017 – We contracted SiteImprove, a service which crawls web pages and PDFs for accessibility and usability issues, to monitor and improve the accessibility of District websites. SiteImprove allowed the District to locate accessibility issues, but proved cumbersome in correcting the issue. It was determined to research other tools and products.
2017 – Evaluated free online tools for accessibility. The following are some of the tools chosen:
- WAVE - WAVE is a web accessibility evaluation tool developed by WebAIM.org. It provides visual feedback about the accessibility of web content by injecting icons and indicators into the web page.
- aXe - Automated tool to find Accessibility defects on websites by using the aXe Chrome extension.
- WebAIM Color Contrast Checker - Allows web technicians to enter or select foreground and background colors. Provides functionality to lighten or darken the colors slightly to find acceptable contrast levels indicates if the colors pass the WCAG 2.0 Level AA and Level AAA requirements for normal text and large text.
July 2017 – Purchased Blackboard’s Regulatory Maintenance Package. As browsers change and accessibility requirements are updated, we wanted to make certain our website template had the most advanced and comprehensive features available. This package ensures our template is in compliance and looks the same as the day the design was approved, no matter the viewing environment. The audit of the template was completed in November 2017. The following issues were completed during the audit:
- Accessibility review and updates to the template include:
  - Review tabbing order throughout the template.
  - Review for screen reader comprehension.
  - Add/Check ARIA attributes to improve/ensure rich template markup.
  - Identify template-based color contrast errors within the district site and recommended alternative colors. Ensure that District 742 has sufficient controls within Template Configuration Window to resolve contrast errors on subsites (typically schools) - Identification and remediation of colors controlled via the Template Configuration Window on subsites are the responsibility of the district.
  - Replace Flash.
  - Update template-based embed codes from 3rd parties such as Google. (Also continuously improving accessibility.)
December 2017 – Blackboard began rolling out it's new product Ally. Ally integrates seamlessly with our system making our digital content more accessible. We opted into Blackboard’s Early Adaptor program.
March 2018, the product was integrated into our site and we were provided training. Blackboard Ally:
- Automatically checks content against WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.
- Ally is still under development and new features continue to be rolled out. Additional features to be rolled out later in 2018 include:
  - Provide students with accessible alternative formats such as audio and electronic braille.
  - Deliver guidance to instructors to improve accessibility of their course content.

Future Plans

Continue repairing pages according to the Repair Prioritization listed below.
Provide closed captioning for videos.
Provide transcripts for audio files.
Accessibility trainings/training materials for employees that handle content development for websites to ensure compliance.

Repair Prioritization

In general, repair of existing web sites, web application and digital content shall be prioritized based according to the following guidelines:

Public side of website will be completed before StaffNet (internal side)
New content will be corrected before older content
HTML pages will be corrected before PDFs
Those which have many visits/”hits” shall be repaired before those that have few visits
Those with the least number of errors shall be repaired before those with more errors
Those which are easiest to repair shall be repaired before those that are more difficult to repair