Accessibility & Privacy
Everyone Comes Home
Homecoming is for every Golden Bull. That has to include the ones using a screen reader, a keyboard, a magnifier, or a phone in bright sun on Beatties Ford Road.
What’s built in
These need no setting and no plugin. They are how the site is made.
- Keyboard
- Every link, button, tab, form field and card rail is reachable and operable with Tab, Shift+Tab, Enter and the arrow keys. A “Skip to main content” link is the first thing you reach on each page. Focus is always visible as a gold outline — navy on gold surfaces, where gold would disappear.
- Screen readers
- Pages use one H1 and a nested heading order beneath it. Decorative images are hidden from the reading order; meaningful ones carry alt text. The schedule renders every day in the markup rather than only the visible tab, so the whole week is readable without activating anything. Tabs, switches and dialogs use ARIA roles and states.
- Contrast
- Body text meets or exceeds WCAG AA (4.5:1). The navy-and-gold palette is the University's own; where gold on white would fall below the threshold, a darker gold is substituted for text while the bright gold stays on navy and for non-text elements.
- Zoom and reflow
- The layout reflows to 400% browser zoom and down to a 320px viewport without horizontal scrolling or clipped content. Type is set in relative units so it responds to your browser's own font-size setting.
- Motion
- Sections fade in on scroll. If your device asks for reduced motion, that is honoured automatically — no setting required. Nothing on the site flashes, blinks, autoplays or moves on a loop.
- Audio and video
- There is none, so there is nothing to caption. If media is added, it will ship with synchronised captions and a transcript before it goes live — not after.
The accessibility button
Bottom-left of every page. Your choices are saved in this browser and re-applied before the page paints, so nothing flashes. They never leave your device.
- Text size
- 100% to 150%, independent of page magnification.
- Magnify page
- Enlarges everything to 150% and reflows it, rather than cropping.
- Invert colours
- Flips the page to light-on-dark and re-inverts photographs so faces stay true.
- Boost contrast
- Pushes contrast and saturation for low-vision reading.
- Underline links
- Underlines every link, so colour is never the only signal.
- Readable font
- Replaces the condensed display type with a plain system face and opens up line height.
- Stop animation
- Removes all transitions and scroll reveals.
Cookies and privacy
This site sets no cookies at all unless you accept them. There is no advertising, no tracking pixel, no data broker and no third-party script running before you choose.
Accepting turns on Google Analytics, which the University uses to see which pages get used and how people arrive. Links from here to jcsu.edu are tagged so the University can see Homecoming sent that traffic. Declining switches all of it off, and the site works identically.
Your accessibility settings and your cookie choice are stored in your browser’s local storage — not in a cookie, and never transmitted anywhere. Clearing site data resets both.
Ticketing, registration and giving happen on other companies’ sites (Urban Tix, Zeffy, the Sheraton). Once you leave, their privacy terms apply, not ours.
Where we stand, honestly
The target is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. The site is built to it and has been checked with keyboard-only navigation and automated tooling.
It has not yet been through a formal third-party audit or user testing with people who use assistive technology daily. Until it has, we’re not going to claim full conformance. Two things we already know fall short: several application forms are PDFs whose internal tagging we don’t control, and the parade route map conveys geography visually with only a text description alongside it.
If something blocks you, tell us and we will fix it and send you the information you were after in whatever format works — phone, email, plain text, large print.
Reviewed August 2026 · Reported barriers are triaged within five business days.