Accessibility

The standard

The Academy aims to meet the European standard EN 301 549, which follows the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at level AA. This covers keyboard use, screen readers, contrast, text size and motion.

What is in place

• Every page can be used with the keyboard alone, with a visible focus ring and a link at the top to skip straight to the content.
• Anything that moves on its own can be paused with the round control in the corner of the page, and it stops on its own when your device asks for reduced motion. The same control starts it again if you would rather see it.
• Ordinary text is black on white or white on black, far above the contrast the standard asks for. The colours that appear on rollover are limited to the deep four, so a word never turns pale on a white background.
• Each page has one main heading, labelled navigation areas and a title that says where you are.
• Forms have visible labels, and their messages are read out by screen readers.
• The site can be read in English or Spanish, and the language of the page is declared for screen readers.

Where it stands

The site is built to the standard and checked when something changes. It has not been audited by anyone outside the Academy. What is known to fall short is listed here rather than left unsaid.

• Two of the four rollover colours, the red and the pink, reach about 4.4 to 1 against white where the standard asks for 4.5 to 1 at ordinary text size. A word carrying one of them is still readable, and it only ever appears under the pointer, but it is short of the mark.
• The layout on very narrow screens, 320 pixels wide, has not been checked yet.
• Where a page carries a film from another service, the controls of that player are that service's own and not the Academy's.

Something in the way

If a part of this site is not accessible to you, write to admin@symbioticdesignacademy.com and say which page and what happened. The Academy answers within ten working days.