Accessibility
This site is built to be usable by everyone, including people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnification, or reduced-motion settings. This page states what standard it is measured against, how that is checked, and what is known to fall short.
The standard
The site is measured against WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That is a target we test against continuously, not a formal conformance claim: no independent accessibility audit has been carried out, and we do not describe the site as certified.
How it is checked
- Automated testing with axe-core runs against each page at desktop and mobile widths, and the site currently reports zero violations on every page that exists.
- The photograph bands, the entrance animations and the film previews each check the reduced-motion setting before they start.
- Interactive controls are real buttons and links with text labels, reachable by keyboard, with focus styling inherited from the design system rather than removed.
- Data tables carry captions, column and row scopes, and live in horizontally scrollable regions that are themselves keyboard focusable.
What you can rely on
- The photograph bands behind headings change every few seconds. They stop while a band is off screen or the tab is hidden, and hold a single photograph when data saver is on.
- The only video is the strip of three screen recordings on the Cambridge home page. None has sound. A silent preview plays while a film is hovered or focused, and a film plays in full only when you choose it.
- A reduced-motion setting stops the photograph bands on their first frame, turns off entrance animation and never starts a film preview. Nothing is hidden as a result: content that animates in is present and readable without the animation.
- Colour is never the only signal. Provenance states carry a word and a glyph as well as a tint.
- A figure that is not published is written out in words, never left as a blank cell.
Known limitations
These are current and specific. They are listed because a statement without them is not informative.
Text over photographs is not machine-verifiable
Several bands place white text over photographs. Automated contrast checking reads CSS colours and cannot see the photograph behind the text, so it skips this text rather than passing it. Legibility comes from a dark overlay whose strength is set against a pure white frame, the brightest one possible, so the text meets the WCAG AA contrast ratio over any photograph. If any of it is hard to read, tell us: the calculation is a floor, not a substitute for your experience.
The photograph bands have no pause button
While a band is on screen its photographs keep changing, and there is no control to stop them. A reduced-motion or data saver setting holds each band on one photograph. The photographs are decorative and carry no information, so nothing is lost by stopping them.
The screen recordings are not described in text
The three films on the Cambridge home page show the software in use. Each has a title and a one-line summary, but there is no transcript or audio description of what happens on screen.
No independent audit has been carried out
All testing to date has been automated plus internal manual checks. It has not been reviewed by an external accessibility specialist, and it has not been tested with a broad range of assistive technologies by the people who actually use them.
Tell us about a barrier
If something here is unusable for you, that is a defect and we want to hear about it. Reports about accessibility are treated the same way as factual corrections: investigated against the page, fixed, and recorded.
