Accessibility statement

Our goal

Our goal is for the Environmental Nexus application and this website to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. We have not had an independent audit, so we do not claim full conformance. Our Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT), linked above, rates the application against each WCAG 2.2 Level A and AA success criterion: of the 56, the application supports 39, partially supports 10, and 7 do not apply to it. None is rated as not supported.

What we do

• Automated accessibility checks run on the main pages of the application, signed in and signed out, in the light and the dark theme, as part of our release checks. We treat serious problems they find as bugs to fix.
• We also check the main pages by hand with the keyboard: tab order, visible focus, focus never hidden under fixed bars, menus and dialogs that close with Escape, and pages at 320 pixels wide.
• The application is built to be used with a keyboard, and a Skip to content link at the top of each page jumps past the navigation. Single-key shortcuts can be turned off under Settings › Preferences.
• Buttons, fields and links have names that screen readers announce, and form errors are shown with the field they belong to.
• Text, focus rings, checkboxes and switches are checked for color contrast in both themes.
• When your device asks for reduced motion, the application does not animate.

Known limits

These are the places the VPAT rates as partly supported. We are working on each.

• Maps (site boundaries, study areas and map layers) are visual, with a short label. The facts they show are also written in the project’s research and in the report text and tables. Planned: a text summary beside each map.
• Drawing or reshaping a site boundary on the map needs a mouse or touch. A site can instead be added by searching for an address or parcel, or by uploading a boundary file.
• Moving a project card to another column on the Projects board, and moving a boundary point on the map, need dragging. Planned: a Move to menu on board cards.
• The project markers on the Home map and the small status dots on a project’s home show a state by color on screen; screen readers announce it in words. Planned: show it in text too.
• In the report’s Read mode, the preview gives screen readers the report’s text without its headings and tables; the Comment and Edit modes have the structured text.
• Short confirmation messages close by themselves after about five seconds, including some that offer Undo. They pause while the pointer is over them. Planned: keep messages with an action open until dismissed.
• Some messages that appear after saving are shown but not announced by screen readers.
• Text field borders are light. Fields are recognized by their labels. Planned: stronger borders.
• At 320 pixels wide, one tab on the Projects list overlaps the search field, and the handles for resizing table columns are narrow (column width can also be changed with the arrow keys).
• Charts on the home page are pictures of numbers that are also listed beside them as text.
• Pages run by other companies, such as card payment, electronic signature and sign-in with Google or Microsoft, follow those companies’ own accessibility practices.

We have not yet tested the application end to end with screen readers or with people with disabilities, and we have not tested generated report files (Word and PDF) with screen readers. The PDF copies of reports are not yet tagged for assistive technology. If a report is hard to use, ask us and we will help, for example with the Word version.

Tell us about a problem

If something in Environmental Nexus or on this website is hard to use with your assistive technology, or you need information or the VPAT in another format, email [email protected] with the page and what happened. We read every message and will reply, and we treat accessibility problems as bugs to fix.