Accessibility Statement for Women Writers Online
The Northeastern University Women Writers Project is committed to ensuring that people with disabilities have full and equitable access to our digital resources. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone, and applying the relevant accessibility standards.
Conformance status
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA.
Women Writers Online is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. “Partially conformant” means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard. The “Evaluation Report” section on this page contains more information.
Feedback
We welcome all feedback on the accessibility of Women Writers Online. If you encounter accessibility barriers on Women Writers Online, please email us at wwp@northeastern.edu.
Technical specifications
Accessibility of Women Writers Online relies on the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:
- HTML
- WAI-ARIA
- CSS
- JavaScript
These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards used.
Evaluation report
An Accessibility Conformance Report for Women Writers Online is publicly available. The report was last updated on July 3, 2025, using version 2.5Rev of the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT®) for WCAG 2.2.
Older conformance reports
Assessment approach
Women Writers Project staff assessed the accessibility of Women Writers Online by the following approaches:
- Manual testing with mouse and keyboard navigation
- Examination with Firefox Developer Tools, especially the Page Inspector and Accessibility Inspector
- Programmatic checking with the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
Roadmap for Remediation
The Women Writers Project continues to work toward the goal of becoming fully compliant with level AA of WCAG 2.2. The revised WWO interface (released June 2025) included fixes for a good number of known accessibility issues. However, we are now aware of more accessibility barriers — mostly minor, but still important to resolve. We hope to achieve full compliance by the end of 2025.
Please see the Women Writers Online Accessibility Conformance Report for the WCAG criteria relevant to the issues below.
| Issue description | Remediation status | Planned release date |
|---|---|---|
| The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson rely on visual formatting to convey complex meaning. An accessible alternative is not available. | Planned | December 10, 2025 |
| The WWO documents do not use semantic HTML markup to communicate things like heading levels. | Planned | December 10, 2025 |
| Some document features are described through CSS, the content of which is not available to screen readers. Examples: “Figure”, “Printed caption”, “Handwriting”. | Fixed and released | December 3, 2024 |
| Content of tooltips is not persistent when a user attempts to move their mouse to that content. | Fixed and released | December 3, 2024 |
| Links in the sidebar and header are not visually differentiated from the surrounding text. | Fixed and released | December 3, 2024 |
| The Timeline visualization does not have a text alternative. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| The Timeline visualization cannot be interacted with by keyboard. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| The tab order of the “Feedback” link may be confusing for people expecting to access it after the contents of the left-most sidebar. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| The WWO interface does not support portrait orientation. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| The WWO interface loses functionality at smaller screen sizes. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Screen readers receive no status messages. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Users cannot pause, stop, or hide the spinner animation which displays when a page is loading. | Fixed and released — the spinner is no longer used | June 24, 2025 |
| Icon images have a low contrast with the background color, about 2.5:1. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| If the basic search field is filled out, the content of the field is not replicated when switching to Advanced Search. | Fixed and released | July 3, 2025 |
| The basic search field has “Keyword” as a visual placeholder, but this is not represented in the form input’s label, nor does it match the form input’s label in the advanced search form. | Fixed and released | July 3, 2025 |
| Some content does not appear inside an ARIA landmark. | Fixed and released | July 17, 2025 |
| Users are given no feedback when a search criterion isn’t what WWO expects to receive. | Fixed and released | September 3, 2025 |
| Adjusting the spacing of letters to 0.12x the font size may cause the Timeline axis labels to appear cut off. | Fixed and released | September 3, 2025 |
| The Timeline visualization includes targets of small size which are also in close proximity to each other, making selection difficult for users with shaky hands. | Fixed and released | October 16, 2025 |
This statement was last updated on October 16, 2025. It was originally created on April 30, 2020, using the W3C Accessibility Statement Generator Tool.
