The District of Columbia State Improvement Grant (DC SIG) Web site is committed to making every document on its web site accessible to the widest possible audience. We work with our own skilled graphic designers and system engineers to insure that our documents are, to the maximum extent feasible, accessible to persons using special assistive technology, including screen reading software and refreshable Braille displays. Because we are continuously under development, we will continue to improve upon our current accessibility features.

Standards Compliance

• Pages on this site are mostly WCAG A approved, complying with most priority 1 guidelines of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Again, this is a judgment call; many guidelines are intentionally vague and can not be tested automatically. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that these pages are mostly in compliance.
• Pages on this site are Section 508 approved, complying with all of the U.S. Federal Government Section 508 Guidelines. Again, a judgment call. We have reviewed all the guidelines and believe that all these pages are in compliance.
• All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. h1 elements are used for main titles, h2 and h3 tags for subtitles.

Images

All content images used in this site include descriptive ALT attributes. Purely decorative graphics include null ALT attributes

Visual Design

This site uses cascading style sheets for visual layout. If your browser or browsing device does not support stylesheets at all, the content of each page is still readable.

Accessibility references

• W3 accessibility guidelines, which explains the reasons behind each guideline.
• W3 accessibility techniques, which explains how to implement each guideline.
• W3 accessibility checklist, a busy developer's guide to accessibility.
• U.S. Federal Government Section 508 accessibility guidelines.

Accessibility software

• JAWS, a screen reader for Windows. A time-limited, downloadable demo is available.
• Opera, a visual browser with many accessibility-related features, including text zooming, user stylesheets, image toggle. A free downloadable version is available. Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and several other operating systems.