WCAG Level AA Compliance
Tourient fully complies with WCAG Level AA guidelines to help you create accessible self-guided tours. As a result, our platform is also Section 508 compliant.
Level AA compliance is the legal standard required by accessibility laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the US and similar legislation worldwide. It strikes a balance between accessibility and practicality for most websites and applications.
Text
Color Contrast
Tourient automatically calculates safe color contrast ratios for text and background colors, making sure they comply with WCAG standards of at least 4.5:1 for text. Tourient uses text and icons to primarily convey information, rather than using colors.
Text Resizing
Text can be resized up to 200% without losing functionality, via pinch to zoom or text zoom controls in the Settings menu.
Inclusive Communication
We recommend creating content that doesn't overwhelm visitors with "walls" of text. Break up your text into short, digestible paragraphs at a 4th or 5th grade reading level.
Keyboard navigation
All interactive elements and menus are keyboard accessible, with a thick outline as visible focus indicator. Any opened menus can be exited via the keyboard as well.
Screen readers
In support of screen readers, Tourient has fields for alternative (ALT) text for images, but adding this ALT text is your responsibility.
Descriptive Link Text
Another responsibility of yours is ensuring any links use descriptive text. Rather than using 'click here', which gives zero information about where a link leads, take a moment to describe what happens when clicking or tapping on a link.
Doing so helps sighted users and screen readers understand what is happening. And it has the added bonus of complying with GDPR and other privacy laws, which legally require you to get a visitor's consent before taking an action.
Proper Heading Structure
Screen readers expect page headings to descend in a logical structure. Page titles use the H1 tag, subheadings use H2, and so on.
Descriptive Page Titles
Similar to descriptive links, titling a tour stop 'Stop 2' tells you nothing about what it contains.
Consistent navigation
Throughout the app, a consistent bottom navigation with buttons for home, stops, wayfinding method, map, and settings is shown. When on a tour, a consistent top navigation with previous and next stop buttons is shown.
High Contrast Mode
A dark mode and high contrast mode option provide enhanced contrast for visitors.
Media
Video captions
Tourient supports YouTube and Vimeo video embeds. Both platforms have video caption options. If you embed videos, it is important to make sure they have captions.
Audio Descriptions
Similar to how ALT text describes the content of an image to blind or low-vision users, audio descriptions help people understand the context of a video that is usually in a language they speak.