Accessibility

What is Web Accessibility?

CTBTO places great importance on making our website accessible to all users. Web accessibility is a way for people with disabilities to have equal access to all the information and facilities available on a website. This includes having the freedom to easily navigate, explore, understand, and contribute to the website. CTBTO ensures that every aspect of our website is accessible to people who have visual, audio, motor, speech, physical, and cognitive disabilities. Web accessibility may also be beneficial to others, including aging users.  

Importance of Web Accessibility

With the web becoming increasingly more important for various life resources, including, education, health care, government, leisure, business, and travel, it is essential these resources are easily accessible and available to everyone. Web accessibility allows barrier-free access to this information regardless of disabilities. The web allows those with disabilities to participate more actively in society through web technologies. Web accessibility is not only beneficial to those with disabilities, but also to users in general.

Gold Standard of Web Accessibility

Accessibility to the website was based on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG).  These guidelines are aimed at facilitating access to the website to a range of disabilities, including low vision, blindness, speech and learning difficulties, deafness, hearing loss, limited movement, and/or photosensitivity.

Three levels of conformance are defined in order to meet the needs of all disabilities with each guideline principle. A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest). The main base guideline principles for web accessibility are: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Currently the CTBTO website hosts conformance level AA of the WCAG, satisfying all Level A and AA Success Criteria. The WCAG notes ‘it is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content”.