Identifying Symbols
There are a variety of informative symbols in use to indicate the level of accessibility or availability of assistive technology. See this list of accessability symbols to learn more about the symbols you may encounter, or may wish to apply to your workplace environment.

Accessible Facilities Guide
The Ontario Federation of Labour has produced a guide for planning meetings (opens in a new window) and activities with accessible facilities.  This Guide outlines what to look at when examining the accessbility of a facility.

Durham Transportation Master Plan
The Region of Durham completed a Transit Master Plan (opens in a new window) that incorporates feedback received from the public and agencies from across the region. The plan identifies policies, programs and infrastructure improvements needed to meet anticipated transportation demands to the year 2021.

Removing Barriers for Travellers with Disabilities
The Canadian Transportation Agency introduced the Code of Practice Removing Communication Barriers for Travellers with Disabilities (opens in a new window). The Communication Code is designed to make it easier for persons with disabilities to travel.

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Making Your Site Accessable

Quick Tips to Make Your Web Site Accessible

• Images and animation - use the alt attribute to describe the content of each visual image.  Include text transcripts to describe all time-based animation.
• As much as possible, use relative sizing for fonts and tables. If you hard code the size of font (to 12 points for example) it will not resize for users who select "Large Text" mode in their own browser preferences. User font size "100%" instead, and larger or smaller percents for the titles bullets formatting. Thats how the DREN site is setup! Every page will automatically resize text to the user's needs and it still looks good.
• Plan and design web pages so that they are accessible from the ground up.  The use of Text-only pages should be offered as a last resort. You can make great sites without having to make separate versions of the site for every viewer!
• Send e-mail attachments as text as well as PDF or Word files.
• Page organization.  Use headings, lists and consistent structure.
• Multimedia.  Provide captioning and transcripts of audio and descriptions of videos.
• Test the site.  Use various browsers and assistive technologies to test all aspects of navigating the site, including tables, images and files.  If possible, have a sample user test the site.

WAVE Accessibility Checker
An online resource that can examine your site pages for conformity with the World Wide Web Constortium's Accessibility Guidelines.
http://www.wave.webaim.org

Ask Alice
A free web service provided by SSB Technologies that allows people to evaluate the accessibility of their web site.
http://askalice.ssbtechnologies.com

Bobby Online
This free service will allow you to test web pages and help expose and repair barriers to accessibility and encourage compliance with existing accessibility guidelines, such as Section 508 and the W3C's WCAG.
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en.index.jsp

Javascript Accessibility
Building a site that uses javascript for some of the content can present significant challenges when trying to ensure the site remains accessible to all. This page reviews those areas to be aware of in a simple, categorical approach and outlines the type of response for a given situation.
http://www.quirksmode.org/js/accessibility.html

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