Policy, Standards, & FAQs

CCC Accessibility Standard

Comprising 116 colleges across 73 districts, the California Community Colleges (CCC) is a publicly funded institution with an ideal that higher education should be available to everyone. In this spirit, the CCC has a mission-driven and legal obligation to comply with state and federal requirements related to accessibility for individuals with disabilities. It is the responsibility of local districts to ensure compliance with all applicable accessibility requirements.

The CCC Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO) is fully committed to making Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and instructional technology accessible. CCCCO views accessibility of such material as foundational to the CCC’s mission and a cornerstone of high-quality pedagogy. As such, the CCCCO has established this standard to affirm accessibility expectations of all CCC districts.

FAQs

Board Policy

Board policies (BP) help shape broad institutional goals and influence compliant decision making. Administrative procedures (AP) provide more specific details regarding specific technology and accessibility standards. Colleges should use both policies and procedures to improve ICT accessibility for their campus communities.

The Community College League of California has issued updated board policy and administrative procedure guidance for technology accessibility. Please refer to Board Policy 3725 / Administrative Procedure 3725 - Information and Communications Technology Accessibility & Acceptable Use for a draft of these policies and procedures.

Board policy for the General Institution can set expectations regarding the institutional approach to ICT accessibility whereas administrative procedures under the General Institution section can provide additional guidance and identify standards specific to website accessibility and other IT-related systems.

College Examples

Section 508 Standards

The Section 508 Standards applies to information and communications technology procured by the federal government. California has adopted the accessibility requirements of the Section 508 standards via California Government Code 7405.

The Section 508 standards have been “refreshed” to update and harmonize these standards with other internationally accepted criteria. As part of this refresh process, the revised Section 508 standards now reference the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level A and Level AA, criteria as the accessibility standard for web content, non-web documents, and software.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) provides information on how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. The WCAG documentation is organized around four principles for Web accessibility, called POUR:

Perceivable
Operable
Understandable
Robust

These four principles provide the framework for guidelines, success criteria, and sufficient and advisory techniques. These additional informational components work in concert to provide guidance and direction for ensuring web content is accessible to individuals with disabilities.

Website Reporting and Complaint Process

Most websites provide the opportunity for site visitors to provide feedback or comments to the college. However, what is not always well defined is how to support feedback or complaints related to an accessibility issue on a website. To learn more about a recommended process, please visit the Reporting and Complaint Process page.

Captions & Audio Descriptions

Captioning

Accessibility for video and audio presentations can be supported by including captions and audio descriptions for video and providing a text transcript for audio. Captions serve as a synchronized textual representation of audio elements like videos, films, television broadcasts, and live events. Further, captions provide the same information in a text format provided through the audio presentation, including speaker identification and sound effects.

Captions that are auto generated should always be edited to ensure they are meaningful and accurate transcription, synchronized with the audio track, and readily available.

Captioning Resources

The CCC Accessibility Center, in collaboration with CVC @ ONE, provides self-paced accessibility courses that enable you to learn at your convenience and progress through the material at your own pace. These courses include topics such as best practices for video captioning and using the captioning tool Shire.

Transcripts

Transcripts allow individuals who cannot access the video or audio content to engage with the material. Video content often provides transcripts as an alternative, while audio-only content requires transcripts. Unlike captions, transcripts do not require synchronization with the audio and remain distinct from the audio track.

Transcripts, whether for video or audio, provide access to those with hearing impairments, non-native speakers, or anyone who prefers written content. These transcripts should incorporate not only the spoken words but also speaker identifications and other significant visual and audio cues.

Transcript Resources

Distance Education Captioning and Transcription Program

The Distance Education Captioning and Transcription (DECT) Grant provides California Community Colleges with funding for live and synchronous captioning and transcription to enhance all students' access to distance education courses. Further, the DECT promotes and supports awareness of available funding to support faculty efforts to develop high-quality, media-rich distance learning courses.

What Qualifies for DECT Funding:

Distance Education (Online, Hybrid, Synchronous, Asynchronous)
Credit and Non-Credit classes
On-campus Classes utilizing distance methods of content delivery as they evolve (e.g., class capture, web conferencing, vodcasting, podcasting, content posted within a Learning Management System)

Live Captioning

Live captioning is critical to ensuring all individuals can fully participate in live events. Live captions use real-time text translation delivered by live human captioners, ensuring that all individuals, including those with hearing impairments or language barriers, can actively engage in live events. Live captioners contribute by providing accurate, real-time captions, distinguishing their work from automated captions, which are often less accurate and contain transcription errors, especially with background noise, multiple speakers, specialized vocabulary, or accents.

Live Captioning Resources

Audio Descriptions

Audio descriptions are required when the multimedia contains crucial visual information that is integral to comprehending the content. Audio descriptions provide essential information that might not be conveyed through a standard audio track to blind and visually impaired users. These descriptions include identifying speakers, clarifying on-screen instructions, directional cues, and other significant visual elements.

It is considered a best practice to incorporate audio descriptions in the planning stages of multimedia production. This method ensures that key visual elements are effectively narrated, eliminating the need to develop resource-intensive alternative versions for audio descriptions. This proactive approach ensures that all individuals, regardless of visual abilities, can fully engage with the multimedia content.

Audio Description Resources

Evaluating Web Content

Evaluating web content for accessibility should involve a combination of automated tests and manual evaluations. For example, while automated tests can identify if there is an accessibility violation at a technical level (e.g., missing alternate text for images), such automated tests cannot accurately assess the quality of the alternate text when such information is included. Evaluating a website for accessibility requires attention to both automated and manual accessibility tests to ensure all individuals with disabilities have equitable access to information.

Automated Testing

Automated tests may include the use of enterprise accessibility tools or web browser testing tools to evaluate the technical accessibility issues of a website or web-application. Automated testing covers approximately 20-30% of accessibility tests and therefore should not be relied upon for an accurate evaluation of a website’s accessibility. Automated testing can be used during the development process and discovered issues should be resolved prior to manual testing.

Some automated tools offer accessibility monitoring for large organizations. These enterprise tools perform large-scale assessments by scanning and reporting on accessibility issues of websites in an organization. The CCC Technology Center has acquired a license for the Pope Tech Website Scanning Tool to assist colleges in monitoring and evaluating public-facing websites for accessibility issues.

Manual Testing

Manual (or human) testing evaluates a website or web-application using a combination of keyboard-only interactions, assistive computer technologies, and web browser plug-ins to ascertain the functional accessibility of the site. Because it is a resource-intensive process, it is not feasible to manually test every single page of a large website. However, focusing on certain pages where manual tests are applied can streamline the evaluation process. For example, manual accessibility testing could be performed on the following types of pages:

Site templates
Representational content pages
Interactive forms
Dynamic content pages
Dialog modals and alerts
Key entry and exit pages (including account login and recovery pages)
Help and assistance pages

Another option is to use website analytics to identify the pages that receive the most visits and traffic and prioritize that content for manual accessibility testing. This can aid in remediating the pages that site visitors use most often.

The CCC Accessibility Center has created a Website Manual Accessibility Checklist (.docx) to assist the CCC system in performing manual evaluations.

Alt Format Databases

Alternate Text Production Center

The Alternate Text Production Center (ATPC) supports California Community Colleges in meeting the alternate text needs of their students with print-related disabilities. Alternate text includes Braille, tactile graphics, and electronic text. All ATPC services are performed at no charge to California Community Colleges.

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