ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT

The KNS website was built following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to meet “AA” level 508 compliance requirements. This was done to enable accessibility of the content by a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are developed through the World Wide Web Consortium process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with the goal of providing a the single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations and governments internationally following overall principles, general guidelines, testable success criteria and a rich collection of sufficient techniques, advisory techniques, and documented common failures with examples, resource links, and code.

Principles: Currently there are 50 checkpoints that are categorized by four principles. These principles provide the foundation for Web accessibility: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.

Guidelines: Under the principles are guidelines. The 12 guidelines provide the basic goals that authors should work toward in order to make content more accessible to users with different disabilities. The guidelines are not testable, but provide the framework and overall objectives to help authors understand the success criteria and better implement the techniques.

Success Criteria: For each guideline, testable success criteria are provided to allow WCAG 2.0 to be used where requirements and conformance testing are necessary such as in design specification, purchasing, regulation, and contractual agreements. In order to meet the needs of different groups and different situations, three levels of conformance are defined: A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest). Note that this site has been built to AA-level standards, which include both Level A and Level AA recommendations.

Sufficient and Advisory Techniques:  For each of the guidelines and success criteria in the WCAG 2.0 document itself, the working group has also documented a wide variety of techniques. The techniques are informative and fall into two categories: those that are sufficient for meeting the success criteria and those that are advisory. It is important to understand that even content that conforms at the highest level (AAA) will not be accessible to individuals with all types, degrees, or combinations of disability, particularly in the cognitive language and learning areas.