Privacy & Compliance Statement

Our website https://majoringinmusic.com (MiM) respects the privacy of its visitors. If you have any questions about the operation of our website, please write to contact@majoringinmusic.com. The following updates to our privacy practices, policies, and agreements ensure that MajoringInMusic.com remains compliant with recent changes to the EU data protection law (General Data Protection Regulation, or “GDPR”). This site is operated in the United States. If you are located in the European Union or elsewhere outside of the United States, please be aware that any information you provide to us will be transferred to the United States. By using our Site, participating in any of our services and/or providing us with your information, you consent to this transfer.

MiM collects names and email addresses from visitors only when submitted via one of our online forms, such as our newsletter subscription form or request for information form. This data is used solely by majoringinmusic.com or partner colleges, universities, or arts high schools and is not shared, traded, or sold to third parties. Name and email address are the only two data items required to either request information from partner schools or sign up for our newsletter. Opt-out is available at any time;

Our web-server collects non-personal data through the use of server-based “session variables,” which we use to achieve important site functionality, and our web-server also records IP addresses from all visitors to our site. An IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you use the Internet. We use IP addresses ONLY to help diagnose problems with our server, to administer our site, to analyze trends, to track user movement, and to gather broad demographic information—all for the purpose of continually improving our website and delivering personalized, custom content. IP addresses are NOT linked to personally identifiable information, and their collection is standard procedure in most web-server environments. In order to improve our services and the website, and provide more convenient, relevant experiences to you, we and our vendors may use “cookies”, “web beacons”, and similar devices to track your activities.

MiM does not ask for nor have any need to accept credit card numbers, social security numbers, telephone numbers or any additional personal information.

More specifically, we collect data from site visitors in several sections of the website as follows:

• Comments: when visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

• Contact Forms: by using a contact form whether for MajoringInMusic.com or to ask for information from one or more of our participating schools, you are opting in to provide your personal information so that you may be sent the information you’ve requested. MajoringInMusic.com does not share your information with any entity other than the schools you’ve indicated, nor do we sell or distribute your personal information of any kind.

• Subscribe: by completing our subscription form, you agree that you have willingly provided your personal information so that we may send you the majoringinmusic.com periodic newsletter. Your personal information is not used for any additional purpose, and you may at any time request removal from that subscription.

• Cookies: if you leave a comment or fill out a form or subscription on our site, you opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies may be used for various plugins including for social media and analytics. MajoringInMusic.com uses Google Analytics solely to understand our traffic to individual schools and article pages. MajoringInMusic does not retain any analytics data on our site nor use the information for any other reason than traffic numbers tracking.

• • Embedded Content from Other Websites: articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

• Shared Data: MajoringInMusic.com shares data with participating schools only when a user has specifically requested that their personal information (name, email address, and relevant school information) be sent to the schools of their choice. This information is not used for any additional purpose.

Our website contains links to other websites. Please note that when you click on one of these links, you are entering another website, for which majoringinmusic.com is not responsible.

By using majoringinmusic.com, you signify your agreement to our privacy policy as stated above. Note that this policy may be revised periodically without notice. Please re-read this policy prior to submitting any personal information if you have concerns about how your information is being collected and used.

Your rights: you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data  we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Accessibility Statement

MajoringInMusic.com is well aware of ADA WCAG guidelines for accessibility. We work continually to build our website for all who wish to access our articles and music school portal pages. Our underlying core software and structure of themes work well with screen readers and other devices designed to translate sites for users and meet the standards of predictability and compatibility. Many details and elements of WCAG accessibility guidelines are not relevant and do not pertain to our site because of our simplicity. 

Our goal is make the website accessible and understandable for all visitors, and the focus with our limited resources is in the design (such as color and structure), readability of text and making certain than elements that may not meet WCAG compliance are not an essential component of the web page. Many of the elements on the site, such as video and images are provided by client schools, and we rely heavily on them to provide WCAG-compliant items if they desire them on their pages.

MajoringInMusic.com has no physical public access component. The website does not deal in e-commerce or product development/delivery, offering only advertising/promotional opportunities to college and university music programs. The website’s only engagement with viewers beyond text access is through each music school’s information request form. All other access to information is via direct links back to each music school’s resident website. 

MajoringInMusic.co uses the following resources to ensure compliance: Accessibility Resources for Developers and Authors, developed to help Federal agencies implement the Revised 508 Standards;  Quick Reference Guide from the W3C on how to meet WCAG 2.0; World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0; Center for Persons with Disabilities, Utah State University 2018 WebAim Program and accessibility evaluation. We will continue to use a variety of of manual and automated testing procedures to make sure we update and remain in WCAG compliance.

Text Alternatives

We provide captions to any image that can be read and turned into audio by screen screen readers. We are working at adding this Alt text to all images on the site to meet this requirement. The images on the website are largely complementary and not required to understand the meaning of the article, we view compliance with this element as an enhancement to the site.

Adaptability

This is a requirement that the content can be simplified to essentially text and still be understood, not, for instance, locating items that are crucial to understanding the content in a sidebar for a footer. WordPress by design and the theme we use have easily understood content areas that contain all the relevant text. Sidebars specific to the content will sometimes exist within that content area but they come after the main content structurally and are not placed in a way that they impede the understanding of the article. We are compliant in this regard.

Distinguishable

There are three items in this requirement that are relevant to the site — audio not being of them because we do not have any audio elements on this site which we produce. What we are concerned with are color (contrast and meaning), resizability of text and images that contain text.

On the first item, approximately 90% of the pages on the website already meet this standard. We have one color in use that we are going to replace (white type on a yellow background) and we will meet this standard in full. While we use multiple colors throughout the website, it is for aesthetic purposes only and there is no specific meaning attached to any color.

The second item, resizability of text, requires that the text be able to be enlarged without the page losing content or functionality. The site passes this standard using browser enlarge functions, which increase the size of the text as well as other elements on the page. We are also looking at modules that will embed that functionality within the content area that will allow the text there to be enlarged independent of other website elements.

On the third item, we are compliant. We do not embed text in images.

Keyboard Accessible

This is a requirement that any functionality on the website that requires user input or interaction be accessed via keyboard. The only elements on the site that fall into this category are the contact forms on school pages. The forms can be filled out and submitted via keyboard. We are looking at enhancements for the forms that will add additional descriptive text to the forms.

Time-based Media

This is a series of requirements to provide alternative for audio and video (sign language, audio transcribed so that it can be read, et al). We do not produce any audio and video elements for the site. We will occasionally post what schools provide and if the schools are providing the WCAG-compliant alternatives, we will add those to the site.

Readable and Predictable – Music School Pages

Advertising pages for each college/university music school, conservatory, or department are fully compatible with requirements. Each school follows the same design pattern even though all material on these pages is developed and provided by the schools themselves. Photographs, text, logos, and video elements are placed on each page in a simplified manner that allows text readers to identify all elements. If any visitor contacts us to ask for clarification or other compliance issue, we will work diligently with the school in question to address the issue.

Contact

Compliance issues regarding MajoringInMusic.com may be addressed to the following:

MajoringInMusic.com
contact@majoringinmusic.com

Copyright Policy

All text, graphics, and photographs appearing on the MajoringInMusic.com web pages are copyrighted and/or trademarked by Information Design, Boulder, Colorado or by partner colleges, universities, or arts high schools. Redistribution or commercial use of this material is prohibited without the express written permission of Information Design. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained herein, this web site is provided on an “as is” basis with no warranties, either express or implied. 

Responsibility for byline article content contained within resides solely with the author, and views contained therein are strictly the opinions of the author and are not officially sanctioned by MajoringInMusic.com or Information Design.

© 2024

MajoringInMusic.com
contact@majoringinmusic.com