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MCGARITY
ACCESSIBILITY
Our Commitment
McGarity Consulting Group, Inc. is a certified woman-owned, minority-led learning and development firm. Since 2015, we have designed instructional, consulting, and advisory solutions for public sector, utility, regulated, and safety-sensitive organizations — environments where every learner must be able to access the training, and where accessibility is often a contract requirement. We are committed to making the products and services we deliver usable by everyone, including individuals with disabilities.
We build accessibility into our work from the first design decision rather than treating it as a step performed after content is complete. This commitment applies to the learning, change management, and advisory deliverables we produce for our clients, and to the information we publish on this website.
A deliverable that does not conform is not released.
STANDARDS
Standards We Apply
We produce electronic and information technology deliverables to conform with the applicable accessibility requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended (29 U.S.C. 794d), and the standards issued by the United States Access Board at 36 CFR Part 1194. Those standards incorporate the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA success criteria for electronic content.
For eLearning and other digital content, our instructional designers and developers apply WCAG 2.1 Level AA as our working standard, meeting or exceeding the Section 508 baseline and keeping pace with current guidance for assistive technologies. Where a contract specifies the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, we design and verify to those requirements as well.
What This Covers
Our accessibility practices apply to the deliverables we develop and provide, including:
Learning and Training Deliverables
- Instructor-led training materials, facilitator and participant guides, and workshop slide decks
- eLearning modules and interactive courses built in tools such as Articulate Storyline 360 and Rise, and published as SCORM, xAPI, or HTML5 for delivery through your LMS
- Job aids, performance support tools, and microlearning
Documents, Data, and Media
- Technical writing, policies, procedures, reports, and plain-language documents
- Dashboards, data visualizations, and analytics products
- Video, audio, and other multimedia content
- Web-based content published by McGarity
OUR PROCESS
How We Build Accessibility Into Our Work
Accessibility is a production requirement in our development process, not a remediation step. Guided by Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles and our ADDIE-based design process, and checked against an internal WCAG design checklist, our practices include:
- Logical document and course structure, correct reading order, and a consistent heading hierarchy
- Alternative text for images, charts, and other non-text content
- Properly structured tables with identified header rows and columns
- Sufficient color contrast, with information never conveyed by color alone
- Descriptive link text that makes sense out of context
- Captions and transcripts for video and audio, and support for text-to-speech
- Keyboard-accessible navigation and controls for interactive content
- Accessible form labels, instructions, and error identification
- Testing of eLearning across supported browsers, devices, and assistive technologies, including verification that tracking and reporting function correctly after LMS integration
We use accessibility audit tools and iterative stakeholder review (for example, Articulate Review 360) throughout development. Accessibility conformance is verified during our independent quality review before a deliverable is released to the client.
Accessibility Conformance Reports
Where a client or contract requires one, McGarity provides an Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR), prepared using the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), for a specified deliverable. To request a report, or to ask about the conformance status of a specific product or service, contact us using the information below.
Meetings, Training, and Events
McGarity ensures that the meetings, workshops, seminars, and training sessions we conduct — whether in person or virtual — meet applicable accessibility standards for persons with disabilities under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended. We identify the specific accessibility needs of anticipated participants in advance of each event and arrange appropriate accommodations, which may include sign language interpretation, real-time captioning, bilingual facilitation, materials in alternate formats, and accessible facilities.
REPORT A BARRIER
Requesting an Accessible Format or Reporting a Barrier
If you encounter an accessibility barrier in any McGarity deliverable or on this website, or if you need information in an alternate format, please tell us. We take this feedback seriously and use it to improve our work.
