Accessibility Policy

The purpose of this policy is for Railscape to ensure that its website is as user-friendly as possible.

Scope of Policy.

At Railscape we look to uphold equal opportunity and equal access to information for people with disabilities aligning to WCAG2.1 guidelines.

WCAG 2.1 is based on four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

By focusing on principles, not technology, they emphasise the need to think about the different ways that people interact with content. For example, users might:

• use a keyboard instead of a mouse.
• change browser settings to make content easier to read.
• use a screen reader to ‘read’ (speak) content aloud.
• use a screen magnifier to enlarge part of a screen.
• use voice commands to navigate a website.

The principles apply to all aspects of your service (including code, content, and interactions), which means all members of your team need to understand and consider them.

Compliance

To meet evolving web accessibility criteria for the above principles, we consider the following aspects: 

Perceivable –

• provide text alternatives (‘alt text’) for non-text content.
• provide transcripts for audio and video.
• provide captions for video.
• make sure content is structured logically and can be navigated and read by a screen reader – this also helps if stylesheets are disabled.
• use the proper markup for every feature (for example, forms and data tables), so the relationships between content are defined properly.
• not use colour as the only way to explain or distinguish something.
• use text colours that show up clearly against the background colour.
• make sure every feature can be used when text size is increased by 200% and that content reflows to a single column when it is increased by 400%
• not use images of text
• make sure our service is responsive – for example to the user’s device, page orientation and font size they like to use.
• make sure our service works well with assistive technologies – for example, important messages are marked up in a way that the screen readers know they are important.

Operable –

• make sure everything works for keyboard-only users.
• let people play, pause, and stop any moving content.
• not use blinking or flashing content – or let the user disable animations.
• provide a ‘skip to content’ link or equivalent.
• use descriptive titles for pages and frames.
• make sure users can move through content in a way that makes sense.
• use descriptive links so users know where a link will take them, or what downloadable linked content is.
• use meaningful headings and labels, making sure that any accessible labels match or closely resemble the label you’re using in the interface.
• make it easy for keyboard users to see the item their keyboard or assistive technology is currently focused on – this is known as ‘active focus’.
• only use things like mouse events or dynamic interactions (like swiping or pinching) when they’re strictly necessary – or let the user disable them and interact with the interface in a different way.
• make it easy for users to disable and change shortcut keys.

Understandable –

• make it clear what language the content is written in and indicate if this changes.
• make sure features look consistent and behave in predictable ways.
• make sure all form fields have visible and meaningful labels – and that they’re marked up properly.

Robust –

• use HTML so user agents, including assistive technologies, can accurately interpret and parse content.
• make sure our code lets assistive technologies know what every user interface component is for, what state it’s currently in and if it changes.
• make sure important status messages or modal dialogs are marked up in a way that informs users of their presence and purpose and lets them interact with them using their assistive technology.

We are actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our website and in this respect, we welcome user recommendations.

Users can get in touch by sending an email to the following email address – [email protected]