Crowdfunder is committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability. We are always actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of our website and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines where appropriate.
We want everyone who visits the Crowdfunder website to feel welcome and find the experience rewarding.
Overview
The Crowdfunder website can be split into two; Crowdfunder published areas and user published areas.
Crowdfunder published areas are under our direct control, and thus have been set up in a way to reach to level Double-A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 where appropriate. This is in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Good examples of this would be the homepage of the site, the project pages, and this page.
User published areas are areas where the content control is largely in the hands of users of the site. They are effectively free to create content as they please, which can jeopardise accessibility. However, the user content is uploaded in a framework that strongly pushes users to create accessible content, and thus much of this is still accessible. The formatting and styling of the site is carried over, and these separate elements are still accessible.
To put it another way; the user published areas are designed to be accessible. They should be so, but it is possible for users to make poor content that will be less accessible.
Good examples of user generated content might be comments or user supplied videos.
Website testing and monitoring
The website is tested each month using our monitoring system and the Web Development Team perform ad-hoc internal tests and act to resolve issues as feedback is received.
We are continually working to make improvements to the website and plan to extend this work to include wider user testing in the future. If you have some feedback, please let us know!
Accessibility exceptions
As implied above, there are some exceptions to requiring or providing accessibility. These are outside of the core pages of the site, so should not affect most users.
There are a few main categories of issues to discuss:
3rd party software
We are aware that some of our third-party forms and applications may not meet WCAG2.1. We are working with our suppliers to bring these up to the standard we expect. We will also be making an assessment when each supplier contract is up for renewal and building in accessibility requirements as part of our procurement process.
PDFs and other documents
Some of our older PDF documents do not comply with WCAG 2.1. We are working constantly to ensure that all future PDF documents are compliant. Some PDF documents do not comply with WCAG 2.1. We are working constantly to ensure that all future PDF documents are compliant however given the volume of the User uploaded PDF documents this difficult to maintain for all cases.
Many of our older PDFs and Word documents do not meet accessibility requirements, for example, they may not be structured so they are accessible to a screen reader. They therefore will not meet WCAG 2.1 success criterion 4.1.2 (name, role value).
We are reviewing the site and aim to ensure by September 2021 to either fix these or replace them with accessible HTML pages. Please note, the accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they are not essential to providing our services.
User generated content
The accessibility safeguards for user generated content can sometimes be circumvented causing several accessibility issues including:
• external link descriptions added by our users specify the link destination
• colour combinations failing to meet the 4.5:1 contrast ratio
• live video streams do not have captions
• recorded video sometimes fails to show audio descriptions
As implied, these issues are usually confined to project specific pages and should affect most website visitors very little.