Accessibility

What we aim for

This site targets WCAG 2.1 Level AA. West Virginia University is required to meet that standard under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and we hold the lab’s own site to it whether or not it is hosted on University systems.

Where we are

Every page has been checked with automated tooling and by hand: keyboard-only navigation, a 320 pixel viewport, 200% zoom, and increased text spacing. The site carries no third-party scripts, no analytics, and no tracking, and it self-hosts its fonts, so nothing about your visit is shared with anyone else.

Specifically, the site aims to:

• describe every photograph in context rather than by filename
• keep a single h1 on each page with headings that cascade beneath it
• give every interactive element a visible keyboard focus indicator
• respect your system’s reduced-motion setting for all animation
• mark links inside running text with an underline, not colour alone
• link to canonical records rather than serving PDFs

Known issues

We would rather list these than imply the site is perfect.

• The tools at /tools/ display a clock that updates every second. The reading is announced only when you press the button, so a screen reader is not interrupted continuously — but there is no control to stop the visible tick.
• The home page hero animates a starfield behind the heading. It stops entirely if your system requests reduced motion, but there is no in-page control.
• Some older DSPIRA cohort pages are archives, kept as they were published. If something on them is unusable, tell us and we will fix or retire the page.

Telling us about a problem

If any part of this site gets in your way, email wvurail@gmail.com. Say which page and what happened; you do not need to know the technical cause. We will reply, and we will tell you what we can fix and when.

For accessibility of West Virginia University’s own web properties, see WVU Digital Accessibility.

About this site’s status

RAIL is a research group in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. This site is maintained by the lab rather than by the University: it is not an official West Virginia University web page, and its content is the lab’s responsibility.