Accessibility

Accessibility Statement

Marymound is committed to positively contributing to the lives of our staff, the children, youth and families who use our services, and all Manitobans, including those living with disabilities. Marymound strongly believes in inclusion and we are committed to meeting the needs of people who face barriers to accessibility in our online content and our physical infrastructure.

Active Offer and Feedback

To meet the needs of any person who encounters a barrier in accessing Marymound spaces or services, we will do our best to provide accommodations upon request. Please provide us at least two weeks’ notice for accommodations. Marymound also warmly welcomes feedback about the delivery of our services and the accessibility of our online content to persons with disabilities. 

Building Accessibility – Plan Your Visit To Marymound

The Marymound administrative building located at 442 Scotia is not accessible for those who use a wheelchair. We do have ground level access at Marymound School with an accessible entrance and washrooms, though this space is not open to the public, unless we are holding an event.

Service animals are welcome at Marymound. We ask that guests in our space refrain from wearing scents. Our shared washrooms are gender neutral.

If you are planning to visit Marymound and require accessibility accommodations, please contact us.

Email: [email protected]
This inbox is monitored daily and you will receive a response to your email within three business days.

Parking

Marymound has a large parking lot with free parking available to staff and visitors. We do have several accessible parking stalls.

Public Transit

Marymound can be reached by public transit, but there would be a requirement to walk at least 400 meters from the closest bus stop on Main Street to our main Administration building.

Website Information 

In July of 2022, Marymound was approved for funding through the Manitoba Accessibility Fund to rebuild the organization’s website with the intention of ensuring that we meet the WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility standards.

Processes and outcomes of website rebuild 

Two of Marymound’s core values are collaboration and respect.

For us, collaboration means working towards a sense of shared responsibility that enhances our collective impact, and respect means working in a way that is inclusive, transparent, and empowering. These core values remained top of mind for the duration of the project.

It was important to us to work with Manitoba-based businesses during the process of rebuilding our website. It was equally as important to involve and hear directly from Manitobans living with different disabilities, and to adequately compensate them for their time and expertise. We hired people living with disabilities to consult on the process and to test the accessibility of our website. The lived experience and perspectives of Manitobans who are living with a disability was (and remains) very important to us.

Initially, we met with an advocacy group at the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) to learn what barriers they face when accessing online content. This first community consultation took place on September 29, 2022 via Zoom and involved 8 participants. The group gave essential feedback, which we integrated into our requests to the website developers.

We researched other ways to increase digital accessibility. The Manager of Marketing and Communications at Marymound, the person overseeing the rebuild of the Marymound website, attended a six-hour workshop on Social Media and Website Content Accessibility on February 15 and 16, 2023. This course was developed by Squarely Social and was helpful in better understanding barriers to accessing online content and how to improve these issues.

Through this course, we were connected to a local Manitoban accessibility consultant, Jennifer Sande. We brought Jennifer on board to advise us from a cross-disability perspective, and to lead the user testing process. Jennifer was an integral part of the lived experience user testing component of our project, and helped us gain a deeper {and}  better understanding of accessibility issues as a whole.

We engaged with a local non-profit organization, the Manitoba League of Persons with Disabilities (MLPD) and they provided us with additional lived experience user testers who provided additional feedback on our website.

Lived Experience User Testing

As the website was in development, we completed different phases of lived-experience user testing. It is important that our website meets the guidelines set out by the funder, but we also wanted to ensure the website is barrier-free for Manitobans living with a disability.

We engaged lived experience user testing with some of the participants from our very first community consultation, and then brought on board other testers through MLPD. We provided the testers with a beta link to our site and they were given assignments to complete and report on in terms of how accessible the site was for them. We made relevant changes and updates based on their feedback. We are grateful for their time and expertise on this project.

What’s Next?

Moving forward, we aim to continue meeting the accessibility guidelines when uploading new content and images to the site. We intend to review the site with the developers on a quarterly basis by doing accessibility scans and addressing any fixes as they come up.

We remain open to hearing from the community if anyone finds any barriers to accessing our website, and will address all concerns brought forward promptly.

Website Accessibility 

Browsers Compatibility

This site has been built using code compliant with WCAG AA standards. Our website should display correctly in the current versions of the following browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari. We recommend you keep your browsers up-to-date. Newer browsers tend to provide more display options to make content accessible, and may work better with assistive technologies.

Responsiveness

Our website has been built to adapt to the screens of modern mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, or Android phones.

Text Size

You can vary the text size by using your browser’s text resize option.

Color Contrast

We have designed this site with text and background color combinations that ensure contrast meets WCAG AA guidelines.

Alternative Text for Images

All images have been given alternative text so that reading devices can “understand” them.

Keyboard Navigation

For visitors who do not use a mouse, pages on this website are navigable using a keyboard alone. Most modern browsers support keyboard navigation, but keystrokes and shortcuts may vary depending on your browser.

WCAG 2.2 Level AA – Ensuring we meet these guidelines

These guidelines are new to us and while we endeavour to meet the guidelines and ensure our website is up to date with Level AA at all times, we are still learning. If you have any feedback on the accessibility of our website – positive or opportunities for improvement, please contact us:

Email: [email protected]
This inbox is monitored daily and you will receive a response to your email within three business days.

Social Media Accessibility 

Social media accessibility is important to us as well. We are working to ensure that all of our stakeholders can access our social media accounts and the posts we put out.

We do our best to utilize CamelCase hashtags on our social media posts. This means capitalizing the first letters of words in multiple word hashtags, which allows screen reader technology to distinguish words in hashtag, increase legibility and make hashtags overall easier to read.

We are also working appropriately to use either alt text or image descriptions. Alt text is a short written description of an image, which makes our posts accessible for those who may use assistive technology such as a screen reader. An image description conveys the same or equivalent information that a sighted person would get when they look at an image. An image description gives more details than alt text and allows someone to learn more about what is in an image than the alt text.

We’d love to hear from you if you have benefitted from our accessible social media content. Drop us a message or a thumbs up. if you’ve had any issues with our accessibly, please reach out to us:

Email: [email protected]
This inbox is monitored daily and you will receive a response to your email within three business days.

Questions About Our Website?

If you are a Manitoba organization looking to increase the accessibility of your website and have questions about our process, please feel free to reach out. We’d love to chat with you.

Please contact us via email:
Email: [email protected]
This inbox is monitored daily and you will receive a response to your email within three business days.

Important Links

Accessibility for Manitobans Act: https://accessibilitymb.ca/index.html

You can learn more about website content accessibility here: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/

Thank you to the Manitoba Accessibility Fund for making this project possible.