Accessibility statement

Where we stand

Accessibility was built into this site from the start rather than added afterwards. That said, we are not claiming certification. Full conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines requires manual testing with assistive technologies and expert review, and that testing has not been carried out. This site was built to support conformance, not to certify it — and this page tells you exactly where the gaps are rather than pretending there are none.

What is in place

Using the site by keyboard

• A skip link is the first thing you reach on every page, so you can jump past the header straight to the content.
• Keyboard focus is always visible and drawn with a high-contrast ring. It appears for keyboard users and stays out of the way for mouse users, where it would only be noise.
• The mobile menu behaves as a proper dialog: focus is trapped inside it while it is open, Esc closes it, the page behind it does not scroll, and when it is closed it is removed from the tab order entirely instead of sitting there invisibly.
• The video controls in the about section are reachable and operable by keyboard, and each one is labelled.

Reading the site

• Every text and background colour pairing used across the site has been measured against the WCAG contrast standard, including the coloured category labels on events and the status messages on forms.
• Text is set in real text, not pictures of text, so it reflows and rescales when you zoom or change your browser’s font size.
• Headings follow a real order rather than being chosen for their size, so a screen reader can be used to navigate a page by structure.
• Fonts are served from this site’s own server, so text renders even if an outside provider is blocked or unavailable.
• Decorative elements — the numbers on cards, the background grid lines, the icons that sit beside a heading that already says the same thing — are hidden from screen readers so they are not read out as noise.

Motion, touch, and no JavaScript

• If your device is set to reduce motion, the scroll animations and transitions stop. Nothing is hidden behind an animation that has to finish first.
• Buttons and other controls are at least 44 by 44 pixels, so they can be hit reliably on a touchscreen.
• With JavaScript switched off the site still works: the header becomes an ordinary bar, the menu becomes a plain list, and all content is visible. Nothing is readable only after a script runs.

Known gaps

These are the problems we already know about. Listing them is more useful than leaving you to find them.

The about-page video has no captions or transcript

It is a short clip of the team at work, it starts muted, and nothing on the page depends on watching it. There is still no caption track and no transcript, so if the clip does carry sound, that sound is not available to you in any other form.

Gallery photo descriptions are generic

Photographs in the gallery are described by which album they belong to and their position in it, along the lines of “November seminar photo 4”. A screen reader will announce something, but not what is actually happening in the picture. Writing individual descriptions for several hundred photographs is work we have not done yet.

No testing with assistive technology

The features above were built deliberately and checked in the code, but nobody has yet sat down and driven the whole site with a screen reader, a magnifier, or voice control. Until that happens there will be problems here that we simply do not know about.

If something does not work for you

Tell us. Email acichapter@uottawa.ca with the page, what you were trying to do, and what got in the way — plus the browser or assistive technology you were using, if you know it. That last detail usually turns a report we cannot reproduce into one we can fix.

If a page is unusable and you need what is on it now, say so and we will send you the content in another format rather than making you wait for a fix.