CIBER's Accessibility Center of Excellence (ACE) finds that the North Carolina Division of Services for the Blind (NC-DSB) Website satisfies all Priority 1, 2 and 3 checkpoints and meets Conformance Level "AAA" of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. ¹

The Accessibility Center of Excellence also finds that this website meets the Federal Final Standards of Section 508 (Section 1194.22 a-p) of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended in 1998. ²

We commend the NC Division of Services for the Blind for their outstanding achievements in ensuring that this website is easy to use, accessible to the widest possible audience, visually appealing, information rich and additionally meets and exceeds the standards of the North Carolina State Technical Architecture, Chapter 13 Accessibility Architecture, and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Division of Information Resource Management, Technical Guidelines for DHHS WWW Sites.

To ensure the implementation of accessible web design for the NC Division of Services for the Blind website, NC-DSB engaged CIBER's Accessibility Center of Excellence to assist the agency with the design, development and implementation of the website. ACE worked closely with approximately 50 employees of NC-DSB throughout the development process to ensure that the website would meet or exceed the content, navigation, and usability requirements of the Agency. Human factor and usability testing for this website was successfully conducted by over twenty-five individuals with varying degrees of visual ability. The test team included persons who are blind, persons with low vision, individuals who are colorblind, and persons with no visual impairment.

Human factor, usability, and quality assurance tests were performed on Microsoft Windows 95, 98, and 2000 environments, using a myriad of browsers and assistive technologies including, but not limited to, Netscape Version 4.x, Internet Explorer Version 5.x, Lynx Version 2.8.2, Opera Version 6, JAWS 4.02, Window Eyes 4.0, Hal 4.0 and ZoomText 7.

A number of automated validation tools were used to assist in ensuring conformance to W3C WAI and Section 508. These included, but were not limited to, Bobby 3.2, W3C's HTML Validation Service, W3C's CSS Validation Service, A-Prompt 1.0.5, The WAVE 2.0 and 2.2/alpha.

Bobby interprets Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 5.5 to cover all tables. It reports a Priority 3 error if any table is missing the SUMMARY attribute. However, http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-HTML-TECHS/#table-summary-info describes the use of the SUMMARY attribute only for data tables and not for layout tables. Thus, ACE has interpreted the guidelines as written whenever Bobby reports such an error for a layout table.

The NC Division of Services for the Blind website referred to throughout this statement is http://www.ncdhhs.gov/dsb. If the URL is not http://www.ncdhhs.gov/dsb then review of the accessibility of the site was not included as part of this initiative.

To request portions of this website in an alternative format, please email DSB.Webmaster@ncmail.net or call the NC Division of Services for the Blind at 919-733-9822 or TTY at 919-733-9700.

The NC Division of Services for the Blind welcomes comments on the accessibility of this website.

¹ Copyright © 5 May 1999 World Wide Web Consortium, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de Recherche en informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 W3C Recommendation http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

² Technical specifications of the federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards, 36 CFR Part 1194, covered by Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1998 (Section 508). These final standards were published by the U.S. Access Board and are found at http://www.access-board.gov.

CIBER Accessibility Center of Excellence (ACE), Suite 400, 8521 Six Forks Road, Raleigh, NC 27615, 800-547-5602, Marci Ann Keiser, Practice Director