We pride ourselves in making syllabi accessible. It is a core reason we developed Concourse.
Compared to traditional Word documents and PDFs, our responsive HTML presentation already puts us a step ahead of such syllabus alternatives.
But there's more. We are compliant with the Revised Section 508 standards of the Rehabilitation Act, the Web Accessibility Initiative's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, and the European Union's EN 301 549 accessibility requirements. The simple act of authoring syllabi in Concourse means they will all be fully accessible to users with a range of disabilities and degrees of impairment.
Below are some of the highlighted accessibility-focused features found in Concourse. You can also review our latest Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), version 2.5, attached below.
- Logical and natural heading structure
- A "Skip to Main Content" link on every page
- Fully labeled inputs and buttons
- Simple and complete keyboard navigability
- Extensive use of accessible rich internet application (ARIA) attributes
- Thoughtful color and contrast choices
- Automatic table captioning and descriptive headers and rows
- Orientation and size agnostic presentation
- Guided authoring to promote accessible content and best practices
While we are excited to tell you about all these accessibility features, we also encourage you to explore them for yourself. Consider reviewing your Concourse with an accessibility checker or your own assistive technology.
While HTML view is always the most accessible version available, downloadable PDFs of Concourse syllabi maintain as many accessibility features as possible from the HTML source. Concourse uses Chrome's Print to PDF function to create PDFs; this function is a significant upgrade from previous tools and creates more accessible PDF documents. The accessibility features that do not carry over from HTML source to PDF are the elements for structure (e.g., the Table of Contents) and null presentation elements. Keep in mind that the content of syllabi is as accessible as it is created to be. In other words, if a Concourse syllabus is created with inaccessible content (e.g., images without alt text or underlining for emphasis), then that inaccessible content will also transfer to the downloaded PDF.