To have effective communication with the widest audience possible, this Accessibility Guide provides assistance in how to use alternate forms of communication. Disabilities can fall into four basic categories:

• Blind/Low Vision. Assistive computer technology for this audience includes screen readers, refreshable Braille displays, and screen magnifiers. To assist with accessibility for the blind/low vision population, features such as keyboard navigation, scalability of font size, fuzzy searches, alt tags and high contrast between the background and the text are helpful.

• Deaf/Hard of Hearing. To assist with accessibility for people with hearing loss, captioning synchronized with multimedia as well as volume control enable accessibility.

• Mobility. Assistive computer technology for this audience includes one-handed keyboards, head/mouth sticks and eye tracking. Keyboard navigation as well as voice recognition software may be used by this population to help navigate through a website.

• Cognitive and Specific Learning Disabilities. To appeal to a highly diverse audience, with varying levels of ability, use the following design principles: Simple navigation, consistency in content presentation, clear labels, meaningful content, executive summaries at the top of long documents, and vocabulary understood by a wide audience.