Accessibility statement (public)
The outward, public, human-readable accessibility statement that your service publishes at /accessibility-statement. It is the standard conformance statement that visitors, auditors, and procurement teams expect every public digital service to carry.
What this page is (and is not)
The public page at /accessibility-statement follows the W3C model accessibility statement structure. It is your institution's commitment, its conformance claim against WCAG, an honest list of known limitations, and the channel to report a barrier.
It is distinct from the two internal admin tools:
- Admin -> Digital accessibility (
/admin/accessibility) is a heuristic coverage report over your metadata. It measures how much published content carries each accessibility signal. - Admin -> Alt text (
/admin/alt-text) is the curation worklist where cataloguers author real text alternatives for images.
The public statement is the outward face of that internal work. The page is read-only, never writes to the database, and is designed never to error: if a setting is missing it falls back to a neutral default, and if anything fails it renders an all-defaults statement rather than a 500.
Where it lives
It is a public page (no login). The address is a single path segment,
/accessibility-statement, registered so it is matched before the archival
record catch-all route. A normal record still resolves at its own slug.
You can link to it from your footer, your contact page, or any "Accessibility"
menu item using the route name accessibility.statement.
The sections (W3C model)
- Our commitment - a plain statement that the collection should be usable by as many people as possible.
- Conformance status - the platform is assessed against WCAG 2.2 (the version is configurable), with a configurable conformance label that defaults to "Partially conformant, level AA targeted". WCAG is named as the internationally recognised baseline, and EN 301 549 is named as one recognised harmonised standard that references WCAG - explicitly as an example, not as the sole or governing legal regime. The statement is international and jurisdiction-neutral.
- What is accessible - the accessibility features that are actually wired in: keyboard navigation, semantic structure, curated image alt text, read-a-record in-your-language, and read-aloud. Each feature only appears when its underlying capability is installed, so the statement never over-claims.
- Known limitations - stated honestly as gaps, never hidden: legacy scanned material without full text, third-party deep-zoom and 3D viewers, user- contributed content, and older untagged documents.
- Report an accessibility barrier - a contact email plus an optional feedback form link, and the target response time in working days.
- Preparation of this statement - the date it was prepared and last reviewed.
Configuring it (no code, no new table)
All configurable text is read from the existing ahg_settings table. Set any
of these keys (Admin -> AHG Settings, or the Dropdown / settings store) to override
the neutral defaults. Nothing here is required - the page works unconfigured.
| Setting key | Purpose | Default if unset |
|---|---|---|
accessibility_institution_name |
Your institution / service name | "This institution" |
accessibility_contact_email |
Barrier-reporting email | accessibility@your-site.example |
accessibility_contact_url |
Optional feedback-form / contact-page URL | (hidden when blank) |
accessibility_conformance_level |
Conformance claim label | "Partially conformant, level AA targeted" |
accessibility_wcag_version |
WCAG version targeted | "2.2" |
accessibility_statement_date |
Preparation / last-reviewed date (free text) | the deploy date (never a fabricated legal date) |
accessibility_response_days |
Target response time in working days (1-30) | 10 |
The preparation date deliberately falls back to the deploy date rather than
inventing a legal date. Set accessibility_statement_date to your own reviewed
date once your accessibility team has signed it off.
Keeping it honest
The "What is accessible" list is feature-gated, and the "Known limitations" list is shipped as real gaps, not marketing. When you close a limitation (for example, once a class of legacy documents is reprocessed), update the statement and the preparation date so the public record stays truthful.