Accessibility statement
Accessibility
VerifyED is a working tool for admissions offices, and it has to work for everyone in the office. We target WCAG 2.2 level AA and design to it deliberately rather than retrofitting it. We have not commissioned an independent audit, so this page states what we target and what we have built — not that we conform.
What is built in
- Status never depends on colour
- Every verdict carries three signals at once: a colour, a glyph, and the word itself — "Verified", "Needs review", "Risk found", "Not established". Read in greyscale, or with colour vision deficiency, the answer is unchanged. Glyphs are marked decorative, so a screen reader announces the word rather than a symbol.
- Everything is reachable by keyboard
- Every interactive element takes a visible focus ring — a 2px outline offset from the control, switching to white on dark green surfaces so it stays visible. A skip link at the top of every page jumps straight to the main content.
- Dialogs behave
- Modals move focus into the dialog, keep Tab inside it while open, close on Escape, and return focus to the control that opened them.
- Tables are real tables
- Data is marked up as tables with real header cells and scopes, so a screen reader can announce which column a value belongs to instead of reading a wall of numbers.
- Motion is optional
- Animation is limited to short state changes and never conveys meaning on its own. When your system asks for reduced motion, transitions and animations are switched off rather than shortened.
- Text contrast has a floor
- #6b645b is the lightest ink used on paper anywhere in the interface, which clears WCAG AA for body text. There is no lighter grey to fall back on, so low-contrast labels cannot creep in.
What we have not verified
- No independent accessibility audit has been carried out, and we do not publish a VPAT or an ACR. Our checks are internal: keyboard walkthroughs, contrast rules enforced in the design tokens, and automated tests around the focus and dialog behaviour above.
- Screen reader support is built to standard practice but has not been certified against a specific reader-and-browser matrix.
- Uploaded transcripts are shown as the source document. Where a scan has no text layer, the original document is inaccessible to a screen reader — we extract and present the readable fields alongside it, but we cannot make someone else's scan accessible.
- Third-party content, such as an embedded map, is only as accessible as the provider makes it. We keep such content supplementary, but we do not control it.
Tell us what is broken
If any part of VerifyED is hard or impossible for you to use, email [email protected]. We aim to reply within one business day, and we treat an accessibility barrier as a defect rather than a feature request.
It helps if you can tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and the browser and assistive technology you were using. If you need something on the site in another format, ask and we will send it.