Our Commitment to Digital Accessibility 

The Boston Athletic Association  is committed to ensuring that our digital products are accessible to everyone. We are continually working to improve the user experience across all our digital assets, including our website, race registration forms, entry lists, race results, video content, and more. Our work is ongoing. We are actively taking measures to achieve conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA (WCAG 2.1 AA), the current accessibility standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.  

Measures to Support Accessibility 

The Boston Athletic Association  has taken the following actions:  

  • Appointed an in-house digital accessibility program lead.  
  • Adopted a B.A.A. Digital Accessibility Policy.  
  • Incorporated digital accessibility standards into procurement practices. 
  • Provided digital accessibility training to all staff. 
  • Defined clear digital accessibility targets. 
  • Infused digital accessibility quality assurance into the development of new content.  
  • Commenced work with technology partners to address accessibility barriers in third-party digital products.  

Conformance Status 

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines 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.  The B.A.A. website, www.baa.org, and other B.A.A. digital products are  partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AA.  Partially conformant  means that  some parts of the content may not fully conform with all accessibility standards. The B.A.A. is committed to procuring and working with technology partners to achieve conformance with accessibility standards. Our work is ongoing. 

Technical Specifications 

Accessibility of  www.baa.org relies on the following technologies to work with the particular combination of web browser and any assistive technologies or plugins installed on your computer. These technologies are relied upon for conformance with the accessibility standards: 

  • HTML 
  • WAI-ARIA 
  • CSS 
  • JavaScript 

Assessment Approach 

The Boston Athletic Association  assesses the accessibility of  B.A.A. assets through the following approaches: 

  • Manual and automated testing. 
  • Screen reader testing on desktop and mobile platforms. 
  • Keyboard navigation testing. 
  • Color contrast ratio testing of text and interface components. 

Digital Accessibility Work 

The following action steps are examples of work that is currently underway to improve the accessibility of www.baa.org: 

  • Provide an accessible label for all form controls. 
  • Use meaningful hyperlink text that conveys purpose or destination.  
  • Provide a text alternative for all meaningful non-text content. 
  • Ensure that all HTML pages have a title that conveys the topic or purpose of the page.  
  • Use meaningful and logical heading structure.  
  • Ensure that all interactive components are focusable and operable from a keyboard.  

Should you encounter an accessibility barrier, please contact us at info@baa.org for assistance.