Accessibility statement

Brain Injury Canada (BIC) is committed to ensuring that our website is accessible to everyone. This document outlines our efforts to improving accessibility as well as our commitment to building an inclusive digital site.

We would like to thank the members of the brain injury community with lived experience that participated in our usability testing session for providing critical feedback on navigation and overall website experience.

Thank you to our partner CNIB for conducting accessibility testing as part of our efforts to create an inclusive online experience.

Standards compliance

  • All pages on this site comply as closely as possible with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 AA.
  • We have built our templates so that the site can more easily validate as HTML5.
  • All pages on this site use structured semantic markup. H1 tags are used for the content area of the page, H2 tags are used for main titles, H3 tags for subtitles.

Structural markup

Web pages include 3 different areas:

  • A header bar,
  • A main content area,
  • A footer.

When CSS (Cascading Styles Sheets) are not applied to a document (or when using a screen reader), the 3 areas are read in the above order.

W3C WAI-ARIA Landmarks

This website makes use of WAI-ARIA markup that enhances the identification of major sections and roles on each page. A screen reader will identify major landmarks on the page such as the content area, navigation mechanisms and the search area. The ARIA landmarks used include search, navigation, main, and content info.

Access keys

Because of the way browsers have implemented the access key attribute inconsistently, unfortunately, access keys often clash with keys set aside for use with other User Agents (i.e. assistive technology). For this reason, we have decided to not set default access keys. Users should be able to use the tab key to jump focus between elements on a page.

Images

  • Unless they are purely decorative items, all images used on this web site have suitable alt attributes.
  • Our content should be usable/accessible without images.

Links

  • Every effort is made to have links written so that they make sense out of context. When this is not possible textually, or does not make sense when written in this form, then a title attribute or other type of navigational aid is added to create context.
  • The first link in every document is the default “Skip to main content” link which ships with Drupal. This allows the user to skip directly to what is considered the main section of the page (the content).

Forms

  • All form controls are appropriately and explicitly labeled.
  • Form validation routine does not rely on client-side script.

Scripts

We are using non obtrusive client-side scripts. Content of this web site is usable without JavaScript.

Visual design

  • This site uses Bootstrap Barrio combined with Bootstrap Sass for visual layout.
  • This site uses only relative font sizes, compatible with the user-specified “text size” option in visual browsers.
  • If your browser or browsing device does not support custom CSS at all, the content of each page is still readable.
  • Any information conveyed through the use of color is also available without color (i.e. text based).
  • A “resize” widget has not been added to this site; however, all the functionality that would be provided by such a widget is already built into all major browsers
    • Press Ctrl & + to increase the page size.
    • Press Ctrl & – to decrease the page size.
    • Press Ctrl & 0 (zero) to reset the page size to the web page’s default size.

Software to improve accessibility for visitors

Accessibility guidelines and related resources

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding the accessibility of this site, please use our accessibility feedback form below. We will do our best to improve the experience for you.