Accessibility Statement

---

The American Diabetes Association has worked to eliminate barriers for people with diabetes. This includes working to improve access to online materials for people with disabilities.

To this end, we have carefully designed our site to be easily accessed by all visitors including people with disabilities. We recognize people with disabilities are a significant portion of our site visitors, and Internet users in general. For example, one-fifth of all Americans is affected by a visual, aural, cognitive, or physical disability.

Our Web site meets or exceeds Priority 1 guidelines published by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative and federal guidelines established by Section 508 of the 1998 Rehabilitation Act. Where appropriate, we exceeded the standard guidelines to offer the widest accessibility possible.

Although we continually test and modify our pages for accessibility compliance, there may be legacy pages and pages developed by third parties that are not fully compliant. If you find the format of any material on our site interferes with your ability to access the information, please contact us.

Accessibility Features

Our site includes the following accessibility features:

• Text Size: Most text on our site is set in relative sizes, which means you can increase and decrease text size as necessary. For example, in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows, you can use the menu command: View > Text Size to change the font display.
  
  
• ALT Tags: Descriptive “ALT” text is provided for all graphical non-text elements.
  
  
• Cascading Style Sheets: Style Sheets are used extensively to provide an attractive and usable interface, but the site’s content is presented equally well for those who cannot benefit from visual styling and similar techniques. For instance, our site offers dynamic “fly-out” navigation menus for users who can take advantage of them, yet the site is fully navigable without them.
  
  
• Structured Markup: All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. That means the content is organized into meaningful headers, subheaders and paragraphs that can be recognized by assistive technologies. For example, H1 tags are used for main titles,  H2 tags for subtitles, etc.
  
  
• Color and Contrast: Our design makes careful color selections and maximizes contrast to facilitate understanding by people with color-blindness and other vision disabilities.
  
  
• Frames: Frames are not used on our site. Frames make it more difficult for users with speech browsers to navigate. Frames also impede users who wish to “bookmark” or print a page.
  
  
• Link Names: Each page has been given a descriptive title. Link texts are clearly described for intuitive understanding when read out of context.
  
  
• Skip Navigation: For users using assistive technology, each page includes a link that enables them to skip directly to the page’s content.
  
  
• Plug-ins: Some of our content requires plug-ins such as Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. Please visit Adobe’s Web site to obtain the most accessible version.

How We Tested

We confirmed that our pages operate properly when accessed by a variety of software including Internet Explorer 5 and higher, Netscape Navigator 6 and higher, and AOL 7 and higher. Testing was performed within the Windows and Macintosh environments including Windows 98 and newer, and Mac OS 9 and newer.

For accessibility, site pages were validated using industry-standard software including Watchfire’s Bobby. Pages were also reviewed using assistive technologies including screen readers and screen enlargers. These technologies included Freedom Scientific’s JAWS, Synapse Adaptive’s Windows-Eyes, IBM Homepage Reader, and Ai Squared’s ZoomText. If you use assistive technologies and find that you cannot fully access any information on our site, please contact us.