About CSREES Accessibility

CSREES is committed to making its Web site accessible to all USDA customers and employees. The agency's Web sites are undergoing review and redesign as necessary to ensure that they meet or exceed the requirements of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.

Many of our Web sites currently meet the Section 508 accessibility standards. Furthermore, CSREES continues to work on making all Web sites accessible. Thank you very much for your patience through this redesign process. If you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, please e-mail us at webcomments@csrees.usda.gov.

CSREES Web pages are generally accessible for persons using screen-reading devices. A description of the elements of accessible Web pages is found in The National Federation of the Blind's Guidelines for Web Page Accessibility and the Trace Research Center of the University of Wisconsin's Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines. Yahoo has a listing of companies that provide adaptive computer technology, including screen-reading software.

Many of the documents on the CSREES Web site are in HTML or ASCII (plain text) formats. These formats are generally accessible to persons using screen-reading software. We also have a large number of documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) format, but this format is not compatible with most screen-reading software.

Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) Files

Persons using screen-reading devices generally cannot directly read documents in PDF format. Adobe Systems, Inc., provides a free translation service through its Access Web pages, which will translate PDF files to Web pages (HTML documents). This can be used in one of three ways:

1. The user's browser can be configured to use this service as a helper application, so that every time they click on a link to a PDF document, this document is automatically sent to the Access server and returned as a Web page.
2. The user can go to the Access.adobe.com server and fill out a form. When this form is submitted, the server will retrieve the PDF document, translate it, and return it to the user.
3. The user can send an e-mail message to the Access server, giving the address of the document to be translated. The server will then get this document and translate it to either a Web page or a text (ASCII) document. Note that this is the only one of the three options that also gives the ability to produce a text document from the PDF file.

If PDF files are not on the Internet and the user doesn't want to submit the files as an e-mail attachment for translation, Adobe Access is a free downloadable accessibility plug-in for use with the latest versions of the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT. This plug-in converts PDF files on a user's local system into plain text, which can be read by screen reading programs. For systems with Internet access, Adobe recommends using the forms-based Access translation service instead.

For other PDF tools, see the PDFzone Web site.

If you have questions or concerns about accessibility on our Web site, please e-mail us.

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