Last updated: 8 August 2026.
School Board Research publishes research on whether Ontario school boards make their policies usable by the families those policies are written for. It would be difficult to make that argument from a site that is not usable itself. This statement sets out what we aim at, what we have and have not verified, and how to tell us when we get it wrong.
The standard we aim at
We aim to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act’s Integrated Accessibility Standards apply their web content requirements to designated public sector organizations and to private and non-profit organizations with 50 or more employees. School Board Research is an independent project and falls into neither category, so those requirements do not bind this site. We aim at the standard regardless. It would be incoherent to hold boards to a threshold we treat as optional for ourselves.
What we have done
- Findings are published as web pages, not as PDFs. Every audit result on this site is HTML text that a screen reader, a browser’s reader mode, or a translation tool can process directly.
- Charts carry a text description of their data. Each results chart has alternative text stating the figure for every bar, so the finding is available without seeing the image.
- Pages use a structured heading order, with a table of contents on the longer research pages.
- Documents we cite are linked to their source, so a reader who cannot use our rendering can go to the original.
What we have not done
We have not completed a formal accessibility evaluation of this site, by an external auditor or by automated testing. Accordingly we do not claim conformance to any WCAG level. We claim only the specific measures listed above.
In particular, the following have not been systematically tested on this site: colour contrast across all components, full keyboard operability, screen-reader behaviour, text resizing to 200%, and touch-target sizing on small screens. We intend to run and publish a formal evaluation, and to replace this section with its results.
Known issues
- Videos on this site are embedded from YouTube and are produced by third parties. Their captioning and audio description are controlled by the publisher, not by us.
- Some typography is loaded from a third-party font service. If it fails to load, pages fall back to system fonts and remain readable.
- On our two legislative background pages, a small number of listed sources are not cited at a specific point in the text. They are retained for completeness and are being reconciled.
Tell us when something does not work
If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, we want to know, and we will tell you what we are doing about it.
Email: info@schoolboardresearch.ca
Please include the page address and, if you can, what you were trying to do and what happened instead. We aim to acknowledge accessibility reports within five business days. If you need information from this site in a different format, ask and we will provide it.
Review
This statement is reviewed whenever the site changes materially, and at least once a year. It was last reviewed on the date shown above.