Creating WAI 508 ADA Compliant Templates

Percussion CMS supports the creation and publication of WAI/508/ADA Compliant web sites. Creating compliant templates requires some extra thought during the template design and construction.

All Percussion out of the box widgets and templates are support certified to generate compliant markup on published web sites. Certain widgets, such as the navigation widget, include extra features for accessible web sites, such as skip links for example. 

Best Practices for Creating Compliant Templates

• Complete all image & file asset alt and title tags
• Make the title for images descriptive text of the image that describes the image to a vision impaired user
• Ensure consistent order of header tags, H1 before H2 for example
• Use only one H1 tag per page
• Add Aria tags and roles to any custom widgets
• Enable skip link in navigation widget
• Make sure the Aria label property is unique for all navigation widgets on a template
• Use the newer HTML5 document type for all page templates
• Make sure that color schemes used have sufficient color contrast to be readable for a color blind or visually impaired user
• Include a descriptive title for all links
• Do not embed text content within images, all text content on the site should be machine readable.
• Ensure links are outlined when highlighted with keyboard
• Ensure keyboard navigation of page including dynamic elements
• Confirm order of tabbing to be logical and consistent
• Enable keyboard control of timed elements like auto-sliding image sliders (Next & Previous buttons, etc)
• Make sure the text of the page can be re-sized up to 200% without the loss of functionality
• Include a descriptive title for any embedded iframes