Compliance Plan
TCSG and its Colleges are required to comply with the federal Section 508 accessibility laws. TCSG’s approach for compliance is as follows:
- Assemble accessibility teams. TCSG has formed an accessibility steering committee to guide this project. Additionally, each college has designated a point of contact to coordinate their college compliance efforts.
- Train staff on standards. TCSG will provide training on the federal requirements as well as practical training on how to modify and create accessible electronic documents in various formats.
- Make TCSG and college home pages accessible. Since the TCSG and college home pages are the starting point for most electronic interactions with prospective and current students, the home pages should be made compliant as quickly as is feasible.
- Develop college compliance plans. Each college will be responsible for developing a compliance plan to identify and remediate inaccessible ict. The compliance plan should include an approach for identifying and fixing web content, applications and course materials.
- Ensure new content is accessible. Once training is complete, only accessible content should be posted to the college web sites. Colleges should develop a procedure for testing and remediating content before it is posted to the web.
- Use evaluation tools. TCSG and its colleges will use automated evaluation tools to perform accessibility assessments of TCSG and college web pages, applications and online content.
- Remove non-compliant content from web sites. TCSG and its colleges are responsible for bringing web content into compliance. Colleges may decide to remove inaccessible content from their web sites if it fails to substantially comply with federal standards.
- Monitor progress. Periodically, TCSG will use its automated evaluation tool to run reports for each of the TCSG and college websites in order to monitor and document progress toward the compliance plans. Colleges will also be expected to monitor progress and submit periodic updates on the web and non-web content of their ict compliance plans.
- Integrate accessibility into processes and procedures. TCSG and its colleges must think about how processes and procedures may be revised to ensure that new ict content and technology continue to be accessible. TCSG and its colleges should review procedures for managing web content, procuring ict technology, developing software applications, and on-boarding staff. Addressing accessibility on the front-end is more efficient and provides a clear path to ongoing compliance.
College Compliance Plan Guidelines and Template
Each college will need to establish its own compliance plan. TCSG recommends that colleges following TCSG’s College Compliance Plan Guidelines as they developing their college plans. Broadly, a compliance plan offers a road map to compliance and consists of the following steps:
- Assemble an accessibility compliance team
- Train staff on accessibility standards
- Assess information and communication technology (ICT) content
- Prioritize noncompliant content
- Remove obsolete pages, links and content
- Assign staff to fix content in priority order
- Test revised content before reposting to Internet
- Report progress to president and TCSG as requested.