Accessibility

The higher education package provides an accessible frontend in order to give all visitors including those with disabilities the possibilty to use the website.

The aspects covered by the higher education package include

  • High contrasts in foreground and background colors are used in the default template.

  • Alternative texts for images.

  • Page templates allow increasing and decreasing of font size and magnification without leaving the content unreadable.

  • Landmarks (“roles”) are used in order to explain page areas and their functions.

  • Form elements have a label.

  • Navigation elements can be used with a keyboard (tab navigation).

  • Each new feature is checked against violations of the WCAG 2 guidelines.

Aspects not covered by the higher education package

Whenever editors create content, they need to take care about accessibilty concerns themselves. That includes giving images alternative texts, ordering the headlines in a semantically correct (eg. using one h1, using h2 after h1 and so on).

Some words about tab navigation

The main navigation provided by the higher education package can be used with a keyboard. On some browsers you will need activate the possibility to navigate using the tab key.

On Mac you need to activate the Full Keyboard Access option (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204434) and the “Press tab to highlight each item on a webpage” option, also chrome does have such an option (see http://www.weba11y.com/blog/2014/07/07/keyboard-navigation-in-mac-browsers/).

Firefox honors the mac os keyboard settings and focuses only input fields and buttons by default. (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Preferences/Preference_reference/accessibility.tabfocus)