Introduction
Advance America is fully committed to inclusion of its customers and web visitors with disabilities. We have taken proactive steps to ensure that the pages for our customer within the Advance America website adhere to the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 level AA via a third-party audit and internal training. By redesigning existing content with these guidelines in mind and making continuous and conscious improvements to our future features, Advance America is proud to feature content that is accessible to users of all abilities. This includes alternative text for images, captions for multimedia content, appropriately labeled tables, having clear heading structures, and good color contrast, among other crucial accessibility considerations.
Our Accessibility Initiatives
Our publicly facing web pages have undergone accessibility audits by a third-party accessibility consulting firm, Accessibility Partners. This company used a three-prong approach to testing: skilled accessibility testers with and without disabilities, coupled with assistive technologies and accessibility testing tools. To ensure that Advance America received the most accurate results with respect to accessibility, their test engineers used a process that leverages the right combination of testers and assistive technologies to emulate the experience of many users with disabilities.
The testing team (both with and without disabilities) executed WCAG 2.0 AA diagnostic testing on pages within the realm of the customer experiences. To achieve this, the Accessibility Partners team utilized assistive technologies such as screen readers, screen magnification, and voice recognition software to evaluate the recommended technology solutions from the actual perspective of those with disabilities.
Based on their results, we have implemented their recommendations to wholly increase the accessibility of our site’s experience.
More About WCAG 2.0 AA
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are included in the web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). That is part of the overall umbrella organization of the of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the primary standards organization for the Internet, on an international scale. WCAG 2.0 (the most current update of the standards) is a set of requirements and recommendations that specify how to make content accessible, primarily for people with disabilities. WCAG is broken down into three levels: A, AA, and AAA.
Advance America is striving to adhere to the middle level, AA, which is the most accepted in industries like ours, as well as other organizations’ best practice for web accessibility.
Questions or Comments
While we are very confident in the overall accessibility of our site, occasionally we may miss the mark in some areas. Please don’t hesitate to let us know. If you have difficulty viewing any page via assistive technology, please contact us so that we can make the information available to you.