Web pages requirements
All pages accessible to the general public must display the EPCC logo at the top of the page.
The logo may be positioned to the right of the page and will usually be located beside the page title.
Additionally, on public-access pages, all references to the College must be written as "El Paso Community College" or "El Paso County Community College District."
All pages will contain the following "meta" information providing details about the page itself:
- responsible department
- responsible person, phone number, email address
- expiration date in the form: mm/dd/yy (ex: 01/03/04 for Jan 03, 2004)
All pages must include the following specific footer links:
- a "return to Home Page" link
- an "additional info" mail-to link to the page author or responsible department
All pages are subject to review by the EPCC Webmaster and the Web Team.
This is to insure compliance with existing publishing guidelines for content and style
and to maintain a consistent "look and feel" for all College web pages.
The author will be responsible for periodically maintaining and updating his/her pages.
The page's expiration date will be used to generate notifications to authors concerning
pages about to "expire". This will help to ensure continued accuracy for all web-published
information.
Your pages should display correctly on all browsers, including the text-only browsers such
as Lynx
If your page has anything to do with the hiring or interviewing of people, you must include an
"EEOC" statement at the bottom of the page: "El Paso Community College does not
discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, gender, age or disability."
Spanish text must be correctly written with the proper accent marks. Use the ISO Latin1
HTML escape codes to create accented characters.
Accessibility Guidelines
Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) requires public colleges to provide the same access to information for disabled students that it does for other students.
People with disabilities may be using assistive computer technologies such as screen
readers, which vocalize the content of a web page, voice recognition software (for people
who can not use a keyboard or mouse), screen magnifiers, and refreshable Braille devices
to interpret a web page.
Unlike the old text-based Internet, World Wide Web pages can offer challenges to persons
with disabilities. Web elements and formatting such as Java, JavaScript, refreshable
screens, graphics, forms, frames and columns can defeat the assistive technology devices.
Also, people using older browsers or text-based browsers, such as the Rio Grande
Free net, may experience the same problems.
Meeting the below requirements will help make your web page accessible to all your audience. Following these requirements, are some additional guidelines to make your page more user-friendly.
The following are A.D.A. compliance requirements for E.P.C.C. web pages:
1. Provide alternative text for all images, applets, image maps and other graphical
representations that can not be viewed with a text-based browser. Do this using
the ALT attribute.
2. Transcribe audio and video clips if they contain important information.
3. If you use frames, provide an alternate “No Frames” page. Screen reader
technology, used by the blind, can not properly process frames.
4. If your pages contain moving, scrolling, blinking or auto-updating objects or pages
(like refreshable pages) provide an option to pause or freeze the movement. Screen readers
can not read moving text. Further, blinking objects in the 4 to 59 flashes per second (Hertz)
range can cause people with epilepsy to have seizures.
5. Provide an alternative to C.G.I. Script forms, for example, a printable form that the user
can fill out and mail in.
6. Buttons should be min. .5” by .5” (for persons with motor disabilities).
7. If you use tables (for other than layout), ensure that they have the proper markup to be
understandable by browsers that don’t support tables (i.e. use the “summary” attribute,
and label rows and columns with the header tags). Generally, avoid using tables purely
for layout purposes unless the table makes sense when linearized (screen readers only
read from left-to-right).
8. Use descriptive text links. The text associated with the link should clearly indicate
the destination of that link. For example, for the text “Click here to Return to Home Page,”
“Return to Home Page“ should be the active link (e.g. underlined and in a different color,
indicating that it is a link). Don’t make “Click here” the active link.
9. Testing
Your page(s) should be legible and understandable on most common browsers,
including the text-only browsers such as Lynx. You may access Lynx at:
http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
Test your page(s) on a black and white monitor to ensure that text and graphics
are still legible and the meaning is clear.
Test your page(s) for accessibility to users with disabilities. This includes persons with
hearing, vision and motor impairments. The Center for Applied Special Technology offers
a free online software package that tests your site for A.D.A. compliance. Go to the
following address, then type in the U.R.L. for your site: http://www.cast.org/bobby/
The following are strong suggestions, which will help your web pages be user-friendly
1. Your images should load quickly and easily on a variety of browsers.
Be considerate and remember that many users may be using slow modems
and/or older browsers.
Some of the things you can do:
Keep your images to a minimum.
Total graphics per page should be less than 20K bytes.
Crop your images to the smallest size possible.
Use 16-color images where possible for those V.G.A.
users and your images will always look as you intended them to look.
Consider how your graphics contribute to the overall content. If your pictures are
simply "eye candy," remove them. To learn how to create fast loading images, consult
the Bandwidth Conservation Society web site:
http://www.infohiway.com/faster/index.html
2. Use structural rather than formatting elements to control the layout of your page
(i.e. <STRONG> and <EM> rather than <B> and <I>).
3. Font sizes are already default by CSS same as for the font Arial and Times New Roman.
4. As a rule-of-thumb, keep each individual web address to 10 pages or less in length.
Studies have found that up to 90% of users do not scroll down past the topmost
portion of the page. You should put the most important information at the
top of the page and use the remainder for more detailed information. Alternately,
you can offer a “table of contents” at the top of your page (see below).
Offer a “table of contents” that hot links to individual sections of your page.
This way the user does not have to scroll down the page but merely "hops
down the page" to the linked section.
If you have a document that is broken into a series of separate pages, offer a single
downloadable file for the document (to help people who read documents off-line using
a voice synthesizer).
5. If your site has multiple pages, offer a site map on the home page.
6. Avoid using proprietary extensions, i.e., tags and attributes that work only in
Internet Explorer ® or only in Netscape ®.
7. Avoid offering downloadable files that can only be used with proprietary software
(such as Word ® or WordPerfect ®). Offer files in H.T.M.L. or text format, if possible.
Remember that a P.D.F. file is a graphic that can’t be read by screen readers. If you offer P.D.F. files, please include a link to Adobe Acrobat’s ® free P.D.F. – to - H.T.M.L. and P.D.F. – to - Text translator at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html8. Later versions of H.T.M.L. are more accessibility-friendly. Currently, H.T.M.L. 4.0 is the best option for built-in accessibility features. |