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Accessibility Statement

Overview

The Web Almanac is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for all people. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone and applying the relevant accessibility standards.

This statement was last reviewed on .

Measures to support accessibility

The Web Almanac takes the following measures to ensure accessibility of this website:

  • Include accessibility as part of the development of this website.
  • Review the accessibility using whatever tools are available.
  • Be transparent about accessibility issues on our GitHub pages.
  • Address accessibility issues raised in a timely manner.
  • Publish, and keep up to date, this accessibility statement.

Conformance status

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) defines requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA. The Web Almanac is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AAA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.

We consider ourselves partially conformant because we have not completed a full, externally verified, audit of the website, nor had the website reviewed by screen reader users so cannot be confident of our current status. We have audited all the pages on the website using a number of tools, including the WAVE Accessibility Tool, the Firefox Accessibility Inspector and the AXE Chrome plugin.

The Web Almanac’s purpose is to provide detailed information about the status of the web. While we aim to ensure all content is easily read even by non-experts, the nature of the material may mean there may be a level of expertise and technology understanding needed to understand some chapters and some metrics, which may not meet the WCAG 2.1 level AAA reading level guidelines.

We also use Google Sheets for some interactive visualizations, which may also not be conformant to WCAG accessibility standards. These are loaded via iframes and we do provide images to for all our figures, and only display interactive visualizations when the client software supports this. If using a web browser and you do not wish to view the interactive visualizations, then the images can be enforce by adding a ?print query param to any of the chapters, view the Accessibility chapter in print mode for one such example. We can look to make this functionality easier to activate if necessary, but all visualizations have detailed text descriptions, so we do not believe this is necessary. Please let us know if we are incorrect about this.

We recognize that some of the color choices for our visualizations do not meet WCAG color contrast requirements. We make a conscious effort to use the more contrasting colors and labels to reduce the impact of this. We hope the detailed descriptions, as well as access to the underlying data itself can help with this issue. We aim to improve the accessibility of our visualization color schemes in future years.

In some chapters, we also include other content on the site, not created by ourselves, including YouTube videos, PDF links or links to other articles, which do not meet the strict criteria required of WCAG 2.1 level AAA. See note below on external content.

The PDF version of the Web Almanac follows PDF accessibility best practices and meets the PDF/UA-1 standard.

External content

Many chapters link to other content (videos, PDFs, articles) which are not under our control and which may not meet the high levels of conformance that we have achieved. Where possible, we will provide links to articles in the same language as the page being viewed, but this is not always possible.

Compatibility with browsers and assistive technology

The Web Almanac is designed to be compatible with as many browsers and assistive technologies as possible. The website has been built in a progressive manner, and is fully functionality even without supporting all the modern browser features we use, but you may notice a deterioration in visuals, and lack of some functionality (interactive visuals, comment counts etc.) when not using a modern browser such as a recent version of Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge.

At this time, we have not completed testing in assistive technology hardware or software but have used tools, as mentioned above, to attempt to address any issues in these devices.

Technical Specifications

The website is built on well structured, semantic HTML (including WAI-ARIA where appropriate), enhanced with CSS for styling and limited JavaScript for some interactive components. The website makes use of modern development practices such as CSS Grid, Fetch, and WOFF2 Fonts, which are not supported in older browsers such as IE 11. The website is still fully functional in those browsers but may not be as visually appealing. No extra plugins or libraries should be required to view the website.

The Web Almanac PDF follows the same accessibility standards as the website and additionally, is structurally tagged to aid accessibility.

Assessment Approach

Self-evaluation: the content was evaluated by the Web Almanac team using their own expertise and a number of tools including the WAVE Accessibility Tool, the Firefox Accessibility Inspector and the AXE Chrome plugin. The Web Almanac PDF was tested with an Accessibility Scan in Acrobat Reader Pro DC.

Feedback

We welcome feedback on the accessibility of this website. The best ways to reach us would be to raise an issue on GitHub or email us at team@httparchive.org. We would also welcome pull requests for those that wish to contribute directly. The Web Almanac is a community based project, managed by volunteers, and so we cannot guarantee a time frame for responding to feedback but will respond as soon as possible.