The Core Knowledge Foundation is committed to ensuring that people of all abilities are able to access and use the resources on our website. After nearly a year of working through a wide range of web accessibility updates, we would like to provide you with an update on our progress. While we will continue to improve our website in terms of accessibility, the Core Knowledge Foundation website is now compliant with the latest guidelines for web accessibility.
Working Toward Our Mission
The decision to prioritize updates to improve the accessibility of our website was an easy one for our team to make. An accessible website brings us closer to our mission of advancing excellence and equity in education for all children.
“To achieve this mission, we offer detailed curricular guidance and materials to schools, teachers, parents, and policy makers—to anyone who believes, as we do, that every child in a diverse democracy deserves access to enabling knowledge.”
Now, our free downloadable curricular guidance and materials are accessible to everyone—all educators, parents, policy makers, and others—who can put it into action.
We offer many of our curriculum materials and other resources available for free download on our website, but without an accessible website, finding and downloading resources presented a variety of frustrations for our website users with disabilities. Now, educators and community members of all abilities can use our website to easily access those materials and resources as intended.
About Website Accessibility
An accessible website is a website that anyone and everyone can use as it’s meant to be used.
For a website to be truly accessible, this needs to carry across all of the features that are built into the website, such as our repository of free downloadable curriculum materials and online bookstore. Website accessibility takes a range of disabilities that can affect how people use the web into account, such as auditory, visual, physical and cognitive disabilities.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are the international standard for website accessibility and are the guidelines that we’ve used to update our website. The Core Knowledge Foundation website is now built to be compliant with WCAG version 2.1 AA, the most recent version of accessibility recommendations as of the time of this publication.
Among the many updates we’ve implemented to improve website accessibility include:
- Updating font colors to improve contrast with the background, making it easier for those with visual impairments to read content throughout the website.
- Including a “focus” state for every interactive element on each page, allowing those who can’t use a mouse to engage with the entire website using only a keyboard.
- Improving the HTML structure of the website so those using a screen reader can efficiently navigate the website to find the content that’s most valuable to them.
- Adding additional text context to images so those who may not be able to see them can still understand their purpose.
- And setting the default website language as English programmatically so screen readers use the appropriate pronunciation.
We at the Foundation are thrilled to share this progress with our network, but we also understand that website accessibility requires an ongoing commitment. With the help of our community, we will continue working to ensure our website is accessible for all people and that anyone who shares our mission is able to access the tools and resources they need to join us in advancing excellence and equity in education for all children.
If you’d like to learn more about the wide world of website accessibility for your school or organization, we found the following resources helpful:
If you have questions about website accessibility or feedback to share about using the Core Knowledge Foundation website or materials personally, we encourage you to reach out to our team. We’ll continue to make updates to our website to give each member of our Core Knowledge community the best experience possible.