Accessibility Statement
Aalto University's A+ is subject to the EU's accessibility directive, the aim of which is to ensure equality in a digitalised society and set uniform requirements for accessibility.
A+ was launched in 2013. The site's current accessibility standard is WCAG 2.1, level AA. The requirements of the Directive have been taken into account in the development of the website, and the work continues. The information in this statement is based on self-assessment carried out in the summer of 2020. It has been updated after new platform releases.
Aalto University and the Educational Technology Development and Integration team, in the department of Computer Science, are committed to observing accessibility standards. The following measures are implemented in order to achieve this goal:
- accessibility is part of our mission statement
- accessibility has been taken into account in the university practices
- a member of staff has been appointed to be responsible for accessibility at the university.
- the team's objective is to maintain a service that is technically accessible and understandable in terms of its contents and that is clear and easy to use for all types of users.
If you notice any deficiencies regarding the accessibility of the site beyond those listed below, you can provide feedback to: aplusguru@cs.aalto.fi.
We will respond to your feedback within two weeks, at the latest.
However, if the deficiency is caused by the teaching materials of the course, you may contact the responsible teacher of the course. The teacher may provide the students of Aalto University with individual study arrangements due to an impairment restricting the student's ability to study or other health condition.
You may file a complaint with the Regional State Administrative Agency for Southern Finland if you are not satisfied with the response you have received from us, or if our response does not arrive within 14 days.
Contact details of the supervisory authority
Accessibility monitoring unit
www.saavutettavuusvaatimukset.fi
saavutettavuus@avi.fi
Phone (switchboard): +358 (0)295 016 000
Known Issues
This information concerns the A+ platform, as it is provided. Institutions using A+, as well as creators of course content (teachers) are free to customise their content and styles, which may change the compliance described here.
Note that A+ requires JavaScript support in the web browser or user agent. In particular, all assignments embedded in content chapters depend on JavaScript in order to load correctly.
At present, A+ partly complies with the defined requirements for accessibility. Further improvements are needed, especially:
- Some elements of the service are not keyboard accessible. In particular, assignments embedded in content chapters depend on modal dialogs that sometimes can not be easily accessed with the keyboard. The modal dialogs are used to show the feedback of the user's submissions. However, assignments can always be opened in a separate full view that does not use any modal dialogs. In the full view, the feedback can be opened easily with the keyboard. The full view can be accessed from the content chapter when you navigate to the embedded assignment frame with the keyboard. The link to the full view is located right above the assignment frame and it becomes visible only when it is focused on with the keyboard.
- Some interface elements are unlabelled or unclearly labelled. In particular, form fields in assignments may have non-unique ID attribute values. However, we have already fixed most of these issues.
- Resizing only the text of the page using the browser does not work reliably. At least, the points table in the Your points section in courses has overflowing content when the text size is increased in the browser.
- The language of parts of the content can’t always be ascertained programmatically (the language of pages typically can be).
Further detail can be seen in the results of the self-evaluation carried out in summer 2020.
We are actively working to address the accessibility issues that have been identified.
This summary was last updated in June 2022.