St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church of Bowie is committed to providing a fully accessible website experience for users of all abilities, including those who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers, screen enlargement software, and alternative keyboard input devices to navigate the web.
Ongoing Efforts to Ensure Accessibility
We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1 as our guiding principle for determining accessibility. These internationally agreed-upon standards cover a wide range of recommendations and best practices for making content usable. As we add new pages and functionality to our website, all designs, code, and content entry practices are checked against these standards.
Website accessibility is an ongoing process. We continually test content and features for WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance and remediate any issues to ensure we meet or exceed the standards. Our team members test our website using industry-standard tools such as the Accessibility Checker WordPress Plugin, color contrast analyzers, keyboard-only navigation techniques, and Flesch- Kincaid readability tests.
Accessibility Features On Our Website
The following is a list of items we have included in our website to improve its accessibility:
- Alt Text on our Images
- Links that leave the site are marked “open in new window”.
- Add the site language (lang) and text direction (dir) attributes to the <html> elements.
- Remove the tabindex attribute from focusable elements.
- Remove title attributes from elements that already have a preferred accessible name.
- Ensure that non-navigation links are underlined.
- Ensure the viewport tag allows for scaling, enhancing accessibility on mobile devices.
- Add an outline to elements when they receive keyboard focus.
Where We’re Improving
In our efforts to bring our website up to standard, we are targeting the following areas:
- Improving color contrast ratios.
- Improve Heading Order Errors.
- Remove or correct any empty links.
This is part of our effort to make everyone’s experience at YourThoughtsYourFuture.com welcoming and enjoyable. Please note that while we make every effort to provide information accessible for all users, we cannot guarantee the accessibility of third-party websites to which we may link.
Accessibility Support Contact
We welcome comments, questions, and feedback on our website. If you use assistive technologies and have difficulty using our website, please email support@stmatthews-bowie.org. We will do our best to assist you and resolve issues.