Accessibility Statement
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.
Feedback
We welcome all feedback on the accessibility of our web content. If you encounter barriers to your ability to use our publications, please email us at wwp@northeastern.edu.
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.
The WWP works to conform with level AA of the latest WCAG version, currently 2.2.
Women Writers Project
On April 10, 2026, pages on the main WWP site matching the regular expression
https://wwp.northeastern.edu/(about|project|research|wwo)/
are partially conformant to WCAG 2.2 level AA.
Known accessibility barriers are listed in the Roadmap for Remediation.
At this time, the WWP cannot thoroughly review the accessibility of historical WWP content. Pages within the site paths listed below may contain accessibility barriers. If you require remediation of any pages falling under these URLs, please email us with the pages you need, and we will do our best to accommodate you.
https://wwp.northeastern.edu/lab/— The WWP Lab contains visualizations, many of which are inaccessible to screen readers, or which rely on colors indistinct to those with visual disabilities.https://wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/— The Education and Outreach folder contains many older conference and educational materials.
Women Writers Online
On April 3, 2026, all web pages at https://wwo.wwp.northeastern.edu/WWO
fully conform to
WCAG 2.2 level AA.
The “Evaluation Report” section on
this page contains more information.
Because the partially-conforming WWP site contains support pages for Women Writers Online, WWO partially conforms (or, does not fully conform) to the United States’ Revised Section 508 accessibility standard.
Technical specifications
Accessibility of Women Writers Online relies upon the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:
- HTML5, in XHTML format
- CSS2
- JavaScript (ECMAScript 2024)
In addition, WWO uses the following technologies but does not rely upon them:
- SVG 1.1
- WAI-ARIA 1.2
Evaluation report
An Accessibility Conformance Report for Women Writers Online is publicly available. The report was last updated on April 3, 2026, using version 2.5Rev of the WCAG Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT®) for WCAG 2.2.
We plan to release a report for the INT version of VPAT® by May 4, 2026.
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
- Screen reader testing with VoiceOver
Roadmap for Remediation
As of April 3, 2026, the Women Writers Project has addressed all currently-known accessibility barriers in Women Writers Online. We are now focusing on remediating accessibility barriers across the primary WWP site.
| Site | Issue description | Remediation status | Planned release date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Women Writers Project | The WWP site does not provide a means for bypassing the header navigation bar. | Planned | May 4, 2026 |
| Women Writers Project | Dropdowns in the WWP site navigation bar cannot be dismissed by keyboard users. | Planned | May 4, 2026 |
| Women Writers Project | Links on the main WWP site are not always labeled descriptively. | In progress | October 2026 |
| Women Writers Project | Pages on the WWP site don’t always state that their content is in English. | Planned | October 2026 |
Completed remediations
| Site | Issue description | Remediation status | Release date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | Content of tooltips is not persistent when a user attempts to move their mouse to that content. | Fixed and released | December 3, 2024 |
| Women Writers Online | Links in the sidebar and header are not visually differentiated from the surrounding text. | Fixed and released | December 3, 2024 |
| Women Writers Online | The Timeline visualization does not have a text alternative. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | The Timeline visualization cannot be interacted with by keyboard. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | The WWO interface does not support portrait orientation. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | The WWO interface loses functionality at smaller screen sizes. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | Screen readers receive no status messages. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | Icon images have a low contrast with the background color, about 2.5:1. | Fixed and released | June 24, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | Some content does not appear inside an ARIA landmark. | Fixed and released | July 17, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | Users are given no feedback when a search criterion isn’t what WWO expects to receive. | Fixed and released | September 3, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | 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 |
| Women Writers Online | The WWO documents do not use semantic HTML markup to communicate things like heading levels. | Fixed and released | December 17, 2025 |
| Women Writers Online | The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson rely on visual formatting to convey complex meaning. An accessible alternative is not available. | Fixed and released | April 3, 2026 |
This statement was last updated on April 10, 2026. It was originally created on April 30, 2020, using the W3C Accessibility Statement Generator Tool.
