Accessibility

The commitment

Families reach schools through Nalda, and a family that cannot use the widget cannot reach the school. Accessibility is therefore a functional requirement here rather than a compliance exercise.

The target is WCAG 2.2 level AA.

Conformance status

Partially conformant. Parts of the product have been built and checked against level AA, and parts have not been formally evaluated. This page is honest about which is which, because an accessibility statement that claims a level nobody measured is the specific thing that gets an education vendor in trouble.

What has been checked, and how

Colour contrast. The product uses one light theme with a fixed ink ramp. Text and background pairs are checked by an automated gate that runs on every build and fails it, rather than by a person looking.

Keyboard operation of overlays. Every dialog, sheet and menu goes through one primitive that traps focus, restores it on close and closes on Escape. A build gate fails if a fixed overlay is written outside that primitive.

Motion. Every animation respects the reduced motion preference, and the transparent glass surfaces fall back to solid under a reduced transparency preference.

Text scaling. The interface is built in relative units and reflows rather than clipping.

Progress semantics. Progress indicators carry the right roles and values.

What has not been evaluated

Screen reader testing with real assistive technology. No session with NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver has been run against any surface. This is the largest gap and it is the next thing to do.

A formal audit by an external accessibility specialist. None has been commissioned.

A published VPAT or Accessibility Conformance Report. This page is the interim statement, structured the way one would be, and it is not a substitute for one.

The assistant widget when embedded inside a school's own page, where the surrounding page's styles, landmarks and heading order are outside our control.

Uploaded documents. A school's own PDF handbook is not made accessible by being read into the assistant. The assistant's answer is accessible text; the source document is the school's responsibility.

Known limitations

Some data tables have not been reviewed for correct header association.

Error messages are visually clear but have not been verified as announced by assistive technology.

The Brain is a visual, spatial surface. Everything it shows is also reachable as a list, but the map itself is not usable without sight.

Standards this statement is shaped by

WCAG 2.2 level AA, and Section 508 as revised. In the United States, schools receiving federal funding are subject to Section 504 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and web accessibility complaints are common in education. That is why this page states its gaps rather than its intentions.

Telling us about a problem

If any part of Nalda is unusable for you, tell the school you are contacting, or write to us at the address on this page once it is published. A report about a barrier is treated as a defect, not as feedback.