Compliance Status
At North Star Sites, we believe that everyone should have access to the internet, regardless of their ability. That’s why we’re dedicated to making our website as accessible as possible for every user.
We’re committed to following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level, which provide guidance on how to make web content accessible to people with various disabilities. By adhering to these guidelines, we ensure that our website can be used by people with visual impairment, motor impairments, cognitive disabilities, and more.
We use various technologies to make sure our website is as user-friendly as possible. For instance, we’ve incorporated an accessibility interface that allows people with specific disabilities to customize the website’s UI and design to their personal preferences.
We’ve also integrated an AI-based application that constantly optimizes our website’s accessibility level. This application improves the website’s HTML, adjusts its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by visually-impaired users, and ensures that keyboard functions work well for individuals with motor impairments.
If you’d like to learn more or have a question about how to use our site, please feel free to contact us at guide@northstarsites.com.
Screen-Reader and Keyboard Navigation
Here are some of the ways we’ve made sure our website meets important screen-reader and keyboard navigation requirements:
- Screen-reader optimization:
- As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters our website, they’ll receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate our site effectively.
- We use the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique and provide screen-readers with meaningful data, like accurate form labels, descriptions for actionable icons, and validation guidance for form inputs.
- We also provide element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues, and more.
- Our adjustments are compatible with popular screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. To turn on screen-reader adjustments or access content-skip menus, you can press Alt+1 or Alt+2 on your keyboard.
- Keyboard navigation optimization:
- We’ve added various behaviors using JavaScript code to make our website easy to navigate with a keyboard.
- You can use the Tab and Shift+Tab keys to navigate, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, and navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys.
- You can also use shortcuts like “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
- We’ve made sure that our website’s images have accurate and meaningful ALT tags, and we’ve extracted any text embedded within the image using OCR (optical character recognition) technology.
Disability Profiles Supported on our Website
We’ve created several disability profiles to make our website accessible to as many people as possible:
- Epilepsy Safe Profile: This profile eliminates the risk of seizures that can be caused by flashing animations and certain color combinations.
- Vision Impaired Profile: This profile adjusts the website to make it easier for people with visual impairments, such as Degrading Eyesight, Tunnel Vision, Cataracts, Glaucoma, and others, to navigate and read.
- Cognitive Disability Profile: We understand that cognitive disabilities, such as Autism and Dyslexia, can make it harder to focus on certain elements. This profile provides assistive features to make it easier to find what you need.
- ADHD Friendly Profile:
- Blind Users Profile (Screen-Readers): We support screen-readers like JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack, so people who are blind can browse our website using their preferred software.
- Keyboard Navigation Profile (Motor-Impaired): This profile enables people with motor impairments to navigate the website using only their keyboard. It also includes shortcuts to jump to specific elements, like menus, headings, forms, buttons, and graphics.
Assistive technology and browser compatibility
Our goal is to make sure our website works well with many different browsers and assistive technologies. We’ve worked hard to support all the major systems out there, so you can choose the tools that work best for you.
This includes popular options like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS, and NVDA (screen readers), both for Windows and MAC users.
Notes, Comments, and Feedback
We want anyone to be able to adjust our website to their specific needs. Despite our best efforts, we know that there still may be pages or sections that are not fully accessible yet.
We’re constantly working to improve accessibility by adding new features and updating existing ones based on the very latest technologies available. Our goal is to achieve optimal accessibility for the broadest variety of users.
If you have any suggestions that could help us in our efforts, we welcome your feedback at guide@northstarsites.com. We’re always happy to hear from our users!
