Accessibility

Our commitment. Everyone should be able to read this site, use it with whatever technology they rely on, and reach us without hitting a wall.

Accessibility is a design requirement here, not a finishing touch. The site is built by students of The Neighbour’s Table and every page is checked before it goes live. The work we do is about closing a distance between food and the people who need it, and a website that shuts people out would contradict it. We treat an inaccessible page as a fault to fix.

This statement applies to every page on theneighbourstable.ca. It is maintained by the organization, reviewed whenever the site changes, and dated. It takes effect on the date it is published on this site, and it is written to be read by anyone, not only by developers.

A barrier is a fault.

The standard. This site is built to meet WCAG 2.1 at level AA, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Level AA is the threshold that public bodies and regulators generally work to. It covers contrast between text and background, text that can be resized without losing content, pages that can be operated without a mouse, structure that a screen reader can announce, and meaning that is never carried by colour alone. We hold the whole site to it rather than a few pages.

WCAG 2.1 also adds requirements that matter on a phone: content that works in either orientation, targets large enough to hit, and text spacing a reader can change. Those requirements are part of what we test against, not extras.

Level AA, every page.

What has been done. The site was tested against level AA as it was built, and the fixes were made before these pages went live.

Every text and background colour pair on the site has been measured against the AA contrast threshold and now clears it. Every page can be worked through with a keyboard alone, with the focus outline visible at all times. A skip link takes a reader straight past the navigation to the main content. Images that carry meaning have alternative text, and decorative images are marked so a screen reader passes over them.

Headings run in order, so a page can be navigated by structure. Motion is reduced for anyone whose system asks for it. Text resizes without breaking the layout, and the site works in one column on a small screen.

Tested as it was built.

Known gaps. An accessibility statement is worth nothing if it only lists successes, so here is what is still being worked on.

This site publishes no PDF documents of its own yet. When it does, the same content will also be published as a web page. A few long data tables read well by eye but are harder to follow one cell at a time, and they are being rebuilt with proper row and column headers. Third party embeds are reviewed before they are used.

Everything on this list has a fix planned and a place in the next round of work on the site. If you find something that is not on it, we would rather hear about it than not.

Named, dated, being fixed.

Report a barrier. If any part of this site stops you doing what you came to do, write to andrew.sun.adair@gmail.com and tell us.

Include the address of the page, what you were trying to do, and what happened instead. If you use a screen reader, a magnifier, voice control or any other assistive technology, naming it helps us reproduce the problem quickly. HQ reads every message that comes to that address and answers it. Nobody is passed to a form or a queue.

If you need the content of any page in another format, ask and we will send it. Requests about this site and its accessibility go to the same address as everything else: andrew.sun.adair@gmail.com, read and answered at HQ.

Write to us directly.