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Understanding website compliance

The Indiana Family and Social Services Administration is striving to make our website usable for everyone, including people who have disabilities that affect their hearing, vision or physical capacities. We need your help and understanding.

Hoosiers with disabilities should be able to use our website in a way that works for them, just as those without disabilities use it. This means that all electronic information, documents and technology must be accessible before it can be posted.

Making our website accessible will help ensure that all users, including people with visual, hearing or other impairments, can easily access online information. This is not only the right thing to do, it’s the law!

Digital content comes in many forms, such as text, audio and video files, graphics, animations, images, PDFs, PowerPoint slides, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and other documents posted on our IN.gov website or other sites that contain FSSA content. All these items must be made accessible to users of assistive technologies. For example, a “screen reader” is a software application that converts the text displayed on a computer screen into synthesized speech so the user with a visual impairment can have the same access to online information as others do. Likewise, captions and transcripts help those with a hearing impairment.

What can you do to help? When submitting documents to be posted online, please provide the original Word, Excel or PowerPoint files or any other type of source document whenever possible. Also, before submitting an online request, please refer to the Accessibility Guide, or this 508 Compliance training video, which is a walkthrough tutorial addressing specific accessibility issues for Microsoft Office and how to make documents 508 compliant.

Consider alternatives to posting items online, such as emailing a PowerPoint slide deck or PDF upon request. If a PowerPoint slide deck was used in a video or web stream, have the web team link to that recording instead of posting those documents online. It can take our web team several hours to convert a single, standard PowerPoint presentation so that it is accessible and can be posted to our website. The FSSA website is not a repository for archiving documents. If a file is no longer relevant, please let us know so we can remove it from the web. Historical documents can be archived offline and made available upon request.

Driven by our commitment to ensuring that our websites are accessible, our current turnaround time for posting all online updates is three to five business days on average. By following these recommendations when creating documents, it will make the process much more efficient and improve the usability of our website for all users.

We welcome your questions at WebRequests@fssa.in.gov

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