Accessibility Features and Issues on the Amherst College Website

At Amherst we are striving to make our Website as accessible as possible. If you are a person with a disability, we would like to hear from you about your experience with our Website. Please e-mail comments to web@amherst.edu.

Accessibility Features

• Our Site Map is a text-based overview of the Amherst Website, with links to all the main areas of the site.
• Images on the main pages are accompanied by descriptive "alt" text. (Non-informative images, such as spacers and decorative graphics, are designed to be ignored by screen-readers.)

Accessibility Issues

• Some screen-readers, including JAWS 3.7, have difficulty reading PDF files; however, if you have JAWS 4.0 or higher, we suggest that you download the Adobe accessibility plug-in for Acrobat 5, which should enable these versions of JAWS to read PDFs.
• Currently, most webpages at Amherst are maintained by individual departments, which means that some pages may be more accessible than others. If you encounter difficulty with any particular section of the site, please e-mail web@amherst.edu.

Accessibility in the Future

• Over the 2001-2002 academic year, a focus group studied Web accessibility issues and tested the Amherst site in various screen-readers. The main pages of the site were made more accessible. To address accessibility issues on pages deeper down in the site, the Web designer is working with departments and groups throughout the college, and the Information Technology department is providing training to help people make their pages more accessible.

Thank you for visiting the Amherst College Website.

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