Accessibility Statement

EGE exists to open doors that have been closed to people. A website that some people cannot use would work against that. This page says what has actually been built, what is known to fall short, and how to tell us when we have got it wrong.

What this site aims for

We are working to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1, level AA. We do not claim to have finished.

What has been done

• Images carry alternative text. Not a filename, a description of what is in the photograph. Decorative marks are hidden from screen readers instead, so they are not read out as noise. Pages generated by the course platform are the exception, and are listed under Known gaps.
• Color contrast was measured, not guessed. Every text color in the design was checked against its background and the failures were corrected. Two colors in the original palette are restricted to graphics and are never used for type.
• The whole site works from the keyboard. There is a skip to content link, and focus is always visible as a solid outline rather than removed for looks.
• Headings are in order on the pages EGE writes, so a screen reader user can move through a page by structure. The events calendar and the course platform generate their own headings, which we do not control.
• Motion is decorative only. Nothing important is conveyed by movement alone, and the site respects your operating system setting for reduced motion.
• Our own forms have real labels tied to their fields, required fields are marked, and errors are shown in text rather than by color alone. The course platform sign in is not ours, and is listed under Known gaps.
• The site is built to work at any window width and at increased text size, without content being cut off. That has been checked in a browser, but not yet across a range of real devices.

Known gaps

• Third party embeds. The donation form, the events calendar and the Education Portal course platform are produced by other companies. We chose them partly on accessibility, but we do not control their markup and cannot promise it meets AA. We know the course sign in fields are labelled only by their placeholder text, and we have raised it.
• Video captions. Where we link to video hosted elsewhere, captions depend on whoever published it. EGE’s own video will carry captions.
• PDF documents. Reports published as PDF may not be fully tagged for screen readers. Ask us and we will provide the content another way.
• Testing. This site has been checked by hand and against the guidelines. It has not yet been tested by a screen reader user in an audit, which is the only test that really counts.

If something does not work for you

Tell us and we will fix it, and in the meantime we will get you the information another way. Email [email protected] and say which page and what happened.