South Dakota State University’s vision, built on the foundation of the land-grant mission, underscores and assures accessibility of education to a dynamic society. As a public university, SDSU’s web presence must be created and maintained in accordance with the University’s mission, applicable federal and state laws, and SDBOR and University policies, including, but not limited to web accessibility standards and best practices.
All new, revised or existing public facing electronic content on SDSU official and SDSU affiliated websites —including, but not limited to web pages, images, PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, forms, videos, chat features, etc.—must conform to federal web accessibility requirements, meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (Level A and AA) and comply with Section 508 Standards.
Accessibility means people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, interact with and contribute to the web in a proportionate and similar capacity as all users. Our public web accessibility guide is a single branch of the university’s overall digital accessibility, which includes access to digital learning platforms, textbooks, reading devices, clickers and all related instructional design technologies. This guide discusses web accessibility standards and practices only related to the sdstate.edu public website domain content.
Content is anything you upload to the website that users interact with including text, images, menus, video, audio, graphics, slide shows, documents and linked documents. Beginning Jan. 18, 2018, law will require all federal agencies and any organization doing business with these agencies to comply 100 percent with new governmental web accessibility standards.
