Accessibility

Commitment

At FlatWorld, we believe that universal access to quality education is a right. Part of our commitment to universal access involves providing equal and inclusive learning opportunities to all individuals regardless of age, ability, or situation. We are constantly working to improve our platform to work seamlessly with Assistive Technology, including Voiceover, JAWS, and additional third-party screen readers.

History

We focus our accessibility efforts on the Level AA success criteria set out by the W3C in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG). We retained The Carroll Center for the Blind, based in Newton, MA, as our auditors, to help us ensure that FlatWorld textbooks, software, and supplements comply with the complete set of WCAG guidelines. In 2019, we developed an extensive roadmap and closed the final gaps in our catalog in terms of upgrading alt text/long descriptions for images and close captioning of video inside all our latest editions. Most of the outstanding items from our accessibility roadmap were resolved in 2020, and we also updated to the latest WCAG standards.

As we improve the technical details of building accessible services, we have also worked hard to find practical ways to ensure that items such as accounting tables and chemistry equations not only meet the letter of accessibility guidelines, but are truly as usable as possible. Similarly, our Homework system was built from the ground up to be fully accessible.

Looking Forward

We continue to use commercial best efforts to ensure that all our products comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG). Specifically, in all but a very few areas, we have fully achieved the full “Supports” level of compliance. The remaining roadmap list is short, but in those few remaining areas, we achieve “Partially Supports”, the second highest level, due to small functionality gaps. We are working hard to eliminate these gaps entirely. An example: streamlining the process for keyboard-only users to select multiple answers in our Homework system.

Most importantly, to the extent that you encounter any challenges in accessing our platform or content, please let our Customer Support team know, and we will be very happy to work with you to resolve the situation.

Notes for Using the Online Reader

The FlatWorld online reader uses a standard web interface and includes an accessible table of contents for exploring your FlatWorld textbook. When the page loads, the first link will give you the option to skip to the main content (the text of the textbook itself).

There are two main ways to navigate your book. The “Table of Contents” is a navigation link menu that will allow you to select book chapters or sections. On the bottom of each content page, there are “previous” and “next” menu links that will navigate you to the previous or next section of your book.

Each section of the book may contain flashcards or quizzes to help you study the material. You can access this content by the tablist navigation after the main content area.