Accessibility

We want everyone in the engineering community to be able to use this website, including people who use a screen reader, a keyboard, magnification, voice control, or any other assistive technology.

Our goal

Every page on this site aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at Level AA, the standard most universities and governments use.

What the site does

  • Works with a keyboard. The first Tab press offers a "Skip to main content" link. Every link and button shows a clear focus ring, and menus open with Enter, Space, or the arrow keys and close with Escape.
  • Tested with real screen readers. The menus are checked with VoiceOver on a Mac and NVDA on Windows, and every page has headings and landmarks you can jump between.
  • Zooms and reflows. You can pinch-zoom on phones, and pages fit a 320-pixel-wide screen, the same as 400% zoom on a laptop, without scrolling sideways.
  • Holds up with wider text spacing. Increasing line, letter, and word spacing doesn't cut off any text.
  • Respects reduced motion. If your device is set to reduce motion, the site turns off its fades, slides, and animations.
  • Works in high-contrast modes. Focus rings, buttons, and the current page stay visible in Windows High Contrast.
  • Describes images and links. Photos have text descriptions, and links that open a new tab say so.

Every change to the site is checked automatically before it can go live. If a change would add an accessibility problem to any page, at desktop or phone size, it is blocked until it's fixed.

What isn't perfect yet

  • Embedded Google and Typeform content. Calendars, forms, maps, and documents embedded from Google, and the Typeform contact form, are built by those companies, and we can't change how they work. If one is hard to use, email us and we'll get you the same information another way.
  • Older documents. Some semester reports, meeting minutes, and finance documents are PDFs or Google Docs that may not work well with a screen reader. Ask us and we'll send an accessible version.
  • Archived pages. Pages from past years that are no longer linked from the site haven't been reviewed.

Tell us about a barrier

If something on this site is hard or impossible for you to use, please email the ESC Technical Team at technical@esc.berkeley.edu. It helps to include:

  • the page's address, or what you were looking for;
  • what you were trying to do and what went wrong;
  • your device, browser, and any assistive technology you use.

We'll reply and tell you what we can fix. In the meantime, we'll get you the information or service you need another way.

Other help at Berkeley

Last reviewed on .