Accessibility Statement
Effective Date: Jan 13, 2024
1. Accessibility Introduction
The Accessibility Statement is intended to inform our users about our efforts to improve our “Digital Accessibility” (as defined below), and to provide guidance on how to use our website and digital content in the most accessible way.
We strive to inspire confidence, competence, and authenticity through fashion. Our goal is to ensure that everyone, regardless of their accessibility needs, can enjoy this empowering experience.
We believe that clothing is a powerful way to express yourself, and we want you to feel welcome and comfortable as you explore our content, services, and products. That’s why we are dedicated to providing equitable access to our digital content for our users.
1.1 What Is Accessibility?
Accessibility means making information, activities, and environments easy to use for everyone, regardless of their abilities. It includes both physical and digital spaces and considers not only permanent disabilities but also temporary and situational impairments.
Digital Accessibility
Digital Accessibility refers to accessibility related to digital content, such as websites, applications, and documents. This encompasses considerations for visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive impairments.
1.2 Why Does Accessibility Matter?
A more accessible world benefits both individuals with and without disabilities. By prioritizing accessibility, we can promote diversity and create a more inclusive and equitable world.
Although individuals with disabilities are often the first group that comes to mind, other factors such as age, language, culture, education, income, technological skills, and access to resources also influence accessibility. Recognizing the unique accessibility needs of people in different communities helps determine the steps for improvement.
Accessibility is important because it aims to deliver fair access for everyone, not just equal access. For example, on a website, accessibility may involve adding effects to buttons that activate when a user hovers over them with a mouse or focuses on them with a keyboard, ensuring that both mouse and keyboard users can visually navigate the website.
While guidelines for accessible design exist, they may not account for biases or personal preferences. Additionally, following these guidelines may not always result in a positive user experience or improved usability. To achieve the best results, it is essential to address the needs of users, particularly those with limitations, in a contextual manner.
2. Accessibility Measures
We aim to follow WebAIM’s Principles of Accessible Design, which are widely accepted standards providing recommendations for making content easy to use. As we add new pages and features to our website, we ensure that our designs, code, and content entry practices align with these standards.
We continuously check our website to make sure it’s accessible. We test content and features regularly to meet or exceed WCAG 2.2 Level AA standards. If we find issues, we work to fix them.
Here are a few methods we use to enhance accessibility on our website:
- Allowing users to adjust font sizes;
- Using ARIA roles where appropriate;
- Maintaining acceptable contrast ratios;
- Describing images with text equivalents;
- Providing skip links at the top of the page; and
- Providing touch and keyboard-accessible navigation.
Our team member, Sam, conducts website testing using industry-standard tools like WAVE, color contrast analyzers, keyboard-only navigation techniques, and Flesch-Kincaid readability tests.
3. Conformance Status
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A (lowest), Level AA (mid-range), and Level AAA (highest).
Vostra Moda is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Partially conformant means that some parts of the content do not fully conform to the accessibility standard.
4. Known Issues
While we strive to make our information accessible, we cannot guarantee the accessibility of third-party websites and plugins we may link to or use.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t exempt us from our responsibility, and we make efforts to choose tools that align with our standards.
We’re focusing on addressing these areas:
- WCAG 2.2 Level AA: Audio Description (Prerecorded)
- Text transcripts with audio descriptions and closed captioning may be missing or inaccurate. YouTube embeds might create accessibility issues.
- WCAG 2.2 Level AA: Multiple Ways
- Multiple navigation options, such as a site map or global search function for users to locate pages, is not included.
5. Send Feedback
We appreciate your input on how we can make our content and services more accessible. We are dedicated to ongoing improvements to ensure everyone can access what we offer.
- Please contact us or email us at hellosam [at] vostramoda.com with your comments.
6. Statement Changes
Changelog
- January 13, 2024
- edit Update all references of WCAG 2.1 to WCAG 2.2 per its October 5, 2023 introduction.
- edit Updated our partial compliance from Level A to Level AA.
- drop Known issue from Section 4: Known Issues regarding link support on our stream page. We developed our own solution to address a fix.
- drop Known issue from Section 4: Known Issues for labels, radio selections, and checkbox support on our forms. We now use an accessible form provider, Gravity Forms.
- Add Known issue to Section 4: Known Issues, to include full text transcripts.
- Add Known issue to Section 4: Known Issues, to include multiple navigation options.
- May 14, 2023
- edit Section 1: Accessibility Introduction, to include the purpose of our Accessibility Statement.
- Add Section 1.1: What is Accessibility?, to include definitions of “Accessibility” and “Digital Accessibility”.
- Add Section 1.2: Why Does Accessibility Matter?, to include DEI as part of our efforts.
- Add Known issue to Section 4: Known Issues regarding site forms that may not render visual and structural meaning to screen reader users.
- March 10, 2022
- Add Section numbering.
- Add Section 4: Known Issues.
- Add Known issue to Section 4: Known Issues regarding URLs that are not converted to clickable links on our Stream page.
- Add Section 6: Statement Changes.
- fix Typographical and grammatical errors, and clarified existing text.
- April 22, 2021
- Initial release