Accessibility Statement

Accessibility and inclusion is important to us and is something we feel very passionate about, both from personal and professional point of views. In fact, if you have been following our journey to date then you will know our whole brand originated from this subject matter.

Compliance and Standards

We make best and reasonable attempts to make sure our store is accessible, complies with local legislation as well as international standards.

How Do We Achieve This

In order to achieve this we use the following:

  • Automated testing tools - page by page as well as entire user journeys
  • Native speakers - required for key manual testing elements and includes initial main service offer (English language)
  • Spell checker tools - for web content and product catalog
  • Use of clear and concise language
  • Regular site audits
  • Frequently updated Accessibility Statement (this policy)
  • Automated functional testing tools - writing test scripts and using tools such as selenium to force expected error messages and handling
  • CDN - content delivery networks for faster page speeds based on user location
  • Progressive Web App techniques - plus basic site operation as well as redundancy for enhanced functionality
  • Disabled user testing - real people with disabilities (PwD)
  • User testing - specifically age, education and digital skills focused user testing
  • Use of assistive technologies - includes screen readers and screen magnifiers
  • Use of mental health and well-being professionals and resources (includes safe guarding vulnerability individuals)
  • Use of accessibility consultants

New Site and Roadmap of Improvements

We have just launched our initial store. As such it is a work in progress, our MVP - minimum viable product - release will go through a number of iterations to iron out any issues and introduce new features over time.

Thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.

If you have any queries about web accessibility you can content us at: a11y@gottawearemall.com and will gladly get back to you. Alternatively, please keep on checking this page for the latest updates and site wide changes

Site Features (Current Release - 18 December 2021)

List of current accessibility improvements or features:

  • Bypass blocks - skip to content (and this accessibility statement)
  • Semantic Mark-up - we use modern web standards to deliver our site
    • HTML for structure
    • CSS for presentation & layout
    • JS for scripting
  • Proprietary - we do not use Flash or other non-proprietary software. All our services and content including video, competitions, and interactive quizzes all use modern web standards (such as ARIA and HTML5)
  • Navigation - you can access the site via main navigation, site search feature and / or (HTML) sitemap
  • Heading - we use heading tags for all our pages and each page should have at least one top level heading element (<h1>).
  • Links in context - all links should have meaningful text descriptions if you land on a random store page from an external source (i.e. search engine)
  • Use of color - we do not solely rely on color to convey meaning to content, structure and function on our store
  • Images alt text - non-decorative images such as our product or blog post images have suitable text alternative
  • Access keys - we purposely do not use access keys on our store as there are no agreed upon worldwide standards
  • Performance - we use CDN to deliver most of our libraries and frameworks
  • Performance - where possible we minify our custom assets to increase initial page loading times
  • Media - video with dialog will have alternative transcript or suitable captions / subtitles
  • Media - Non decorative audio with dialog will have transcript or text alternatives
  • Tested in different user agents - our store works in the current mainstream web browsers such as Chrome, Fire, Edge and Safari

The above is just a small sample of our commitment to accessibility. We will flesh this out more in due course as well as publish the results of our audit.

Audit

Known Issues 

A list of accessibility known issues and expected fix date will be published here in early 2022.

Feature Release Date
Dark mode (contrast theme) v0.2.0 (Greenwater) End of January 2022
Reduce animation (prefers motion) v0.2.0 (Greenwater) End of January 2022
Touch viewpoint (increase range for mobile devices) v0.2.0 (Greenwater) End of January 2022
Service worker (progressive web app) v0.3.0 (Bluefire) End of February 2022
User notifications (progressive web app) v0.3.0 (Bluefire) End of February 2022
Camera enabled (progressive web app) v0.3.0 (Bluefire) End of February 2022

Please note that some of our hosted services such as the main store is powered by popular third-party ecommerce solution as such some changes may not be possible or instant and additional SLAs may apply.

Resources

International Standards Resources

Current established and known international standards on web accessibility are:

  • Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/)
  • ISO/IEC 40500:2012(https://www.iso.org/standard/58625.html)

Legislation Resources

Current establish legisation on web accessibility (disability and human rights) are as follows:

  • United States - Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (https://www.ada.gov/pubs/adastatute08.htm)
  • United Kingdom - Equality Act 2010 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/contents)
  • Canada - Ontarians with Disabilities Act 2005 (https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/05a11)
  • Australia - Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2018C00125)