Accessibility: Culture for all
Culture is for everyone and, to this end, we made sure that the alphapolitismos.gr website is also addressed to people with disabilities and impairments. We have adapted the design, development and content of our website in a manner that ensures the greatest possible accessibility to people encountering vision problems. Aiming to include even more categories of disabilities we are in the process of designing additional adjustments.
We follow the WCAG 2.1 standard and comply with the requirements it sets out. For us, these requirements are the success criteria in terms of accessibility. So, we completed success criteria in 2 conformance levels on alphapolitismos.gr:
- Level A – It includes criteria that do not focus exclusively on one type of disability and do not change drastically the life of users. That’s why they have a low impact on the whole mentality behind the website.
- Level AA – It involves criteria that correspond to specific types of disabilities and significantly affect the life of these users. Consequently, they have a major impact on the design and development of the website.
We hosted a 6-hour online web accessibility seminar, prepared by theUXProdigy. Our aim was to respond to the challenges posted by the accessibility criteria. All the members of the design, development and copywriting teams, as well as the heads of our Collections and Archives attended the seminar.
We have designed and developed alphapolitismos.gr with the aim of making it accessible to people with vision problems. We ensured that all functionalities facilitate navigation when using the most popular screen reader and apps: NVDA, JAWS, ChromeVox, Talkback, VoiceOver.
For people with mobility problems, we have incorporated certain essential functions, making keyboard-only navigation possible.
Our website accessibility was audited by theUXProdigy. We corrected all accessibility issues that arose as to:
- Design, such as contrast ratio between text and a background image, so that texts can be easily read by screen readers.
- Development, such as option to stop auto-scrolling.
- Content, such a clear alternative text for audio description of photos, clear titles and descriptive links.
We organised a usability test for people with vision problems. During the test, we confirmed that the participants navigated through the website with ease, located the content they were looking for and knew at all times where they were in the website. They also deemed that the headings, links and alternative texts for the photos were clear.
alphapolitismos.gr has received an accessibility statement, as it fulfilled the success criteria in this sector.
Aiming to make the website fully accessible, we plan to proceed with new adjustments for people with hearing problems. The main one will be the addition of subtitles on all our videos.