The Regulation Room website is designed, maintained and operated by the Cornell eRulemaking Initiative, a group of researchers at Cornell University. The goal of the CeRI team is to make Regulation Room accessible to as many users as possible.

In the Air Travel Accessibility rule, DOT proposed that air travel websites meet the accessibility standard WCAG 2.0 Conformance level “AA.” This means web pages must satisfy the success criteria of both level “A” and “AA.” See WCAG 2.0 Overview. Our team is working hard to meet that standard for all Regulation Room pages involved in this rule. This is more challenging for our site than for an ordinary blog or discussion forum because of the innovative Digress.it technology that allows paragraph-specific commenting on text. Also, our posts deliberately provide many layers of information, so that users can go into the level of depth that matches their interest.

We value the feedback you can  give us on the accessibility of Regulation Room.  We recognize there are many issues about actual usability that automated testers cannot catch.  We could not do extensive human testing on our site before the rule opened because we have a strict confidentiality agreement with DOT that we won’t allow anyone not affiliated with Cornell to see the rulemaking materials before DOT formally announces the rule.  (You can see that agreement: Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)).

So, we hope that you will contact us to tell us about your experience–positive and not so positive–with the site.  And, we would really appreciate volunteers to work with our Chief Technologist, Rebecca Younes, in systematic testing of usability of Regulation Room with various assistive technologies.

Your helping us with Regulation Room will ultimately help DOT in finalizing the website accessibility rule.  CeRI will submit, as a separate comment in the rulemaking, a summary of our experiences with implementing the WCAG 2.0 A and AA guidelines.  Hearing about actual user experiences may be very helpful to DOT.

CONFORMANCE CLAIM

For the Air Travel Accessibility rule, we have updated all content and interactive elements connected with the rule for compliance with the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, Levels A & AA. We have also conducted extensive screenreader testing to ensure that the most important functionality of the site is accessible to these devices.

Accessibility measures adopted

Among the measures we have taken to increase the accessibility of our site are:

  • We strive to use valid HTML throughout the site.
  • We use well-structured, semantic markup for headings, lists, links, buttons, abbreviations/acronyms, and other special text so browsers and assistive devices can successfully navigate our pages. Tables are used only for tabular data and not for layout, page titles are informative, and multimedia is identified textually.
  • The site is keyboard and screenreader accessible, with the exception of some third-party markup which has been removed from the tab order to eliminate confusion.
  • Site navigation aids are provided in the form of consistent navigation menus and a site map. Recurring elements are displayed consistently.
  • Page navigation for screenreader users is facilitated through skip navigation links that allow the user to go directly to content.
  • To facilitate page navigation and provide a logical workflow for both screenreader and keyboard-only users, after completion of a user interaction focus is returned to the element used to initiate the interaction, or to another logical location.
  • Contrast ratios between text and background and between links and surrounding text meet AA specifications.
  • Form markup is designed for accessibility in JAWS Forms Mode. Forms include descriptive labels associated with all input controls, as well as informative button text.
  • User feedback is provided for all form submissions.
  • Error and status messages are positioned and worded for keyboard and screenreader accessibility.
  • Links are visually consistent. They have meaningful text or title attributes to indicate their purpose, and hover states that use cues other than color.
  • Instructional videos provide synchronized captions as well as audio descriptions of all visual demonstrations. The videos are displayed in JWPlayer, which features keyboard-accessible playback controls.
  • All images that convey content specify meaningful alternative text.
  • There is no flashing content or time limits. Automatic fadeout on informative lightboxes has been replaced by manual close buttons.

Areas of continued effort

We continue to address additional accessibility issues throughout the comment period in order to achieve full A & AA compliance and to provide the best possible experience for a wide range of users. Among the remaining issues we are aware of:

  • Pages exhibit some degradation with text-only magnification, and at the high levels of magnification provided by specialized screen magnifiers.
  • There are keyboard traps in the Firefox browser. This problem does not appear to be specific to the Regulation Room site.

Because there is no automated method that can perfectly measure accessibility, a page may occasionally present difficulties for individual visitors. Please do not hesitate to let us know of any issues that you encounter or if you have suggestions for improvement. Please contact us.

Additional caveats

  • Third-party markup such as the Facebook plugin may continue to fall short of the accessibility standards we have set for the site. This markup has been eliminated from the tab order to reduce confusion for screenreader and keyboard users.
  • Screenreader testing has been conducted using JAWS 12 on Internet Explorer. Users of other products or older versions of JAWS may experience additional difficulties.
  • Prior rules are preserved in their original state for research purposes, and therefore no accessibility upgrades have been applied to them.