Accessibility of this website

Approach

When making this site, we learned from our accessibility work on the Janeway platform, and we tried to build accessibility into all stages of our design and development process.

For example, we tailored the colour palette to provide good contrast, we tested the interactive features with assistive technologies as we made them, and we used open web technologies in a variety of other ways to support accessibility.

Testing and audits

To further embed accessibility checks into our daily process, we integrated a set of automated accessibility tests, using the Axe engine, which run automatically on GitHub whenever changes are made to the codebase or content. The tests attempt to cover as much of WCAG 2.2 AA as it is possible to do in an automated way: about 57%, according to Axe. All of the Axe tests are currently passing when run against this website.

However, automated testing is not enough. To assess the full scope of WCAG compliance and discover issues not covered by WCAG, it is necessary to do periodic audits by hand. We are building a process for regularly conducting such audits for the Janeway reader interface, the Janeway back office, and the OLH website. The website you are on is in the queue as well, and a VPAT will be posted here as soon as the first audit is conducted. To see our progress, you can check the public Accessibility project board on GitHub.