Accessibility policy

eCommons complies with Cornell University's policy, Web Accessibility 5.12 by requiring that newly submitted or updated text and audio/visual (A/V) content meets the standards described below. Adherence to these standards for student works (student works that fulfill academic requirements) is very strongly encouraged, but not required. All other content must meet these standards. It is the responsibility of the submitter to comply with the policy by providing web accessible content. Repeated submission of non-compliant content may result in the suspension of submission privileges. Non-compliant content may be subject to removal.

If you have any questions about whether or how this policy applies to your content, please contact us before submitting.

Accessibility standards and practices

  • General: All new content should meet the current standards prescribed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
  • PDF: PDFs shall pass Adobe Acrobat’s native accessibility check without issues.
  • MS Office documents: MS Office documents shall pass MS Office’s native accessibility check without warnings or errors.
  • EPUBs shall pass an EPUB accessibility checker, with no WCAG (most current version, level AA) errors.
  • Audio or video (A/V) content:
    • Machine-generated captions will be created for uncaptioned A/V recordings with spoken language. Upon request, CUL will provide a caption file to the submitter or submitting unit for correction.
    • Video content or animations that are exclusively visual (contain no spoken language) must be accompanied by a text description of the critical information depicted. The accompanying descriptive document must itself be web-accessible.

Related information

Please see Help for submitters: Accessibility for information on creating web accessible PDFs, MS-Office documents, Google docs, and A/V content, and specialized metadata related to accessibility.