General

Cape Cod Collaborative is committed to making its electronic and information technologies accessible to individuals and is committed to accessibility, diversity and inclusion for all of its guests, including persons with disabilities, by meeting or exceeding the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act (29 U.S.C. 794d), as amended in 1998. Section 508 is a federal law that requires agencies to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to electronic information and data comparable to those who do not have disabilities.

Accessibility on CapeCodCollaborative.org

This website utilizes various technologies all meant to make it more accessible. We utilize an interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and transform it to their personal needs. This interface replaces the older fashioned method of providing all users with the same, lesser but accessible design or user interface.

Here are some of the interface’s capabilities

Font handling – users can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust spacing, alignment, line height, and more.

Color handling – users can select various color contrast profiles such as light, dark, inverted and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds, with over 7 different coloring options.

Animations – epileptic users can stop all running animations in an instant, at the click of a button. Those animations include videos, GIFs and CSS flashing transitions.

Content highlighting – users can choose to emphasize important elements such as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered elements specifically.

Audio muting – users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other issues due to automatic audio playing. This option lets users mute the entire website instantly.

Cognitive disorders – we utilize a search engine that is linked to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of phrases, initials, slang, and others.

Other options – we provide users the option to change cursor color and sizing, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard and much more.

Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level every 24 hours. This AI engine remediates the website’s HTML issues, as well as functionality and behavior, to the use of blind people that are using screen readers, and the motor impaired that are using a keyboard to operate websites.

We utilize AI for the following accessibility components

 

Screen-reader optimization

The AI runs in the background and learns the website’s components top to bottom, thereby providing screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, it will provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others.

Additionally, the AI scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, click the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn adjustments on as soon as they enter the website.

Keyboard navigation optimization

The AI adjusts the website’s HTML, as well as adding various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website fully operable by a keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the entire site using the TAB and SHIFT+TAB keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with ESC, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key, and more.

Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus (available at any time by clicking Alt+1). The AI will also handle triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and It’ll not let the focus drift outside of it, for best orientation.

Browser and Assistive Technology Compatibility

We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all the modern, major and popular systems that comprise over 95% of the users’ market share and include: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge and I.E 11 or above, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.

This website is operable using other systems and platforms as well, though we are not officially supporting them and recommend users to utilize the aforementioned.

Disclaimer

Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs, it is possible that there will still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible.

If you notice any content, feature or functionality of this website that you believe is not fully accessible to people with disabilities, please contact us and provide a description of the specific feature you feel is not fully accessible or a suggestion for improvement. We take your input seriously and will consider all feedback received as we evaluate ways to accommodate our customers and continuously improve our overall accessibility policies.

Need Help?

If you’ve discovered a bug or malfunction, if you find any aspect of the interface difficult to use, or if you have improvement ideas, we’ll be happy to hear from you. Please send an email to the Cape Cod Collaborative web accessibility team at info@insitemediadesign.com.

Contact Us

If you wish to report an accessibility issue, have any questions or need assistance, please contact Cape Cod Collaborative’s Web Accessibility Support as follows: Email: darlene@insitemediadesign.com or call Darlene Billmair at 508-685-9042.