05 Accessibility

Owned by Andrew Petro
Last updated: Jan 08, 2009 by Colin ClarkVersion comment
1 min read

There are numerous standards and checklists for accessibility compliance worldwide, with each country adopting different levels of compliance. Recognizing that institutions will set their own accessibility policies, the uPortal community has chosen not to rigidly conform to a single set of guidelines. Instead, we use widely-accepted Web accessibility techniques and provide personalization and customization features. As a framework, uPortal 3 allows implementors to fully customize the theme and skin, ensuring that a variety of accessibility standards can be accommodated. uPortal 3 provides a number of important accessibility features out of the box, including:

Assistive Technology Support

  • Good semantic markup that works well even when CSS is disabled
  • Support for scaling text sizes up to 200% and down to 50%, allowing a range of screen magnifications
  • Use of alternate descriptions for images and links
  • Graceful degradation: JavaScript and AJAX support is configurable and optional

Keyboard Navigation

  • Skip links for fast, efficient keyboard navigation
  • Effective use of tabindex
  • Configurable access keys

Evaluation Tools Used

uPortal is periodically reviewed using a WCAG 2.0-compliant checker tool (AChecker, created by the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre) and the accessibility walkthrough guidelines supplied by the Fluid Project (Fluid Accessibility UX Walkthroughs).

Statement of intent

While we believe that uPortal 3 can be used with assistive technologies out of box, we're always striving to improve our accessibility support even further.