We are committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone and applying the relevant accessibility standards and best practices regularly.

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs conducted by Federal agencies, in programs receiving Federal financial assistance, in Federal employment, and in the employment practices of Federal contractors.

Section 504 states that “no qualified individual with a disability in the United States shall be excluded from, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any program or activity that either receives Federal financial assistance or is conducted by any Executive agency.

Section 508 now establishes requirements for electronic and information technology developed, maintained, procured, or used by the Federal government. Section 508 requires Federal electronic and information technology to be accessible to people with disabilities, including employees and members of the public.

In December 2000 the Federal Access Board issued final standards for electronic and information technology under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. These were adopted and published in the Federal Registrar in April 2001 with enforcement to begin June 21, 2001.

While these standards currently apply to federal government, it is the direct responsibility of Florida state government agencies and their web designers and developers to become familiar with these accessibility guidelines and to apply these principles in designing and creating any official State of Florida website.

On July 1, 2006, the Florida Accessible Electronic and Information Act was implemented that requires Florida State Government web sites to comply with Section 508 to ensure the widest possible audience easy access to government information. Section 508 standards are based on access guidelines developed by the Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

To navigate between pages, use the hypertext links available within the documents. These links are usually seen in a color differing from the general text. In the event that there are no hypertext links available, use the forward and back buttons in your browser.

 Downloadable Files

The following viewers are available:

• • Microsoft Viewers for Word Documents (.DOC), Excel Spreadsheets (.XLS), and PowerPoint (.PPT) are FREE. Please visit the Office Online File Converters and Viewers site for additional information.
  • Acrobat Viewers for Portable Document Format (.PDF) files are FREE. Please visit the Adobe Reader Download site for additional information. Many documents on this site are in the Adobe Acrobat file format. The court has chosen to release certain documents via the internet in the Adobe Acrobat format to preserve the original look and format of the hard copy version.

Conformance status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. 

We have installed an automatic accessibility tool that runs in the background. This tool runs Ai and machine learning to remediate accessibility deficiencies in the HTML code. In addition, it provides an interface that allows visitors to manipulate their browsing experience. The complete toolset aims to assist this site in conforming as closely as possible to the standards by the WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

Additional accessibility considerations

Although our goal is WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance, we have also applied some Level AAA Success Criteria: Images of text are only used for decorative purposes. Some WCAG 2.1 Level AA requirements are not included in the remediation process as they are outside of the scope of the website source code, including but not limited to video captions. 

Measures taken by this website to achieve compliance

• Complete WCAG 2.1 Level AA website audit and remediation on page load. All on-page elements are scanned and reviewed against our accessibility standards library to ensure compliance. If remediation is required, the element is tagged, and our Ai remediation tool makes necessary, non-invasive corrections on the client-side of the site

• Auto Image and Link recognition and remediation for content that does not contain alt or title text for users that require screen reader access; descriptions are stored for user adjustment to assist our machine learning algorithms

• Quick access to search Meriam Website for definitions and pronunciations of words.

• Colorblindness adjustments to improve distinction between colors for Red-green color blindness (Deuteranomaly, Protanomaly, Protanopia, Deuteranopia), Blue-yellow color blindness (Tritanopia, Tritanomaly), Other color blindness (Achromatopsia, Achromatically)

• Reset fonts to Arial or Implementation of Dyslexia friendly font 

• Ability to Highlight Titles and Links

• Text Magnification

• Content, Font, Line Height, Line Spacing Scaling, and Zoom

• Content alignment including left, center, and right

• Dark and Light Contrast modes and High Contrast that increases contrast ratio to 135%, and complete inversion of colors

• Saturation adjustments including High (140% saturation), Low (90% saturation), Monochrome (0% saturation)

• Complete element color control including Title, Font, and background color adjustments with color-safe color palettes to ensure optimal contrast ratio of 4.5%

• Ability to stop motion (videos, animated graphics, web element transitions, etc.), hide all images, and mute sounds

• Simple reading guide or more elaborate page mask to assist users in focusing on-page content

• Highlight element on hover or focus to ensure both keyboard and mouse users can orient themselves on the focused element

• A screen reader that reads back page content on highlight 

• Complete keyboard navigation control

• Aggregated settings into browsing profiles to quickly deploy accessibility configurations for multiple user types.

Compatibility with browsers and assistive technology

We strive to be compatible with the following assistive technologies:

• Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS, and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and for MAC users.

Technical specifications

Accessibility of this site relies on the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browsers and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer:

• HTML

• WAI-ARIA

• CSS

• JavaScript

These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards used.

Notes

While our main goal is to make the entire site accessible to all users, there is a possibility that some pages may not have been discovered or do not have a satisfactory accessibility remediation solution at this time. We are committed to constantly improving the accessibility of this site to ensure it is accessible to all.