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Accessibility Statement

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OpenCities Product Team

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Our commitment to access for all

OpenCities is committed to helping governments transform their digital customer experience. That means supporting governments to make their digital content and services accessible and usable by everyone. 

This is our commitment to accessibility, a web that everyone can access. When you use the OpenCities platform, including the OpenCities CMS and OpenForms, you can rest assured that all functionality is thoroughly tested against the latest accessibility guidelines and standards (with both automated tools and specialist manual checks). 

The standards we follow

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are a set of criteria to help make web technologies and web content more accessible. Following these guidelines makes content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity, and combinations of these. Employing accessibility best practices also improves the user experience of all users.  

The OpenCities platform meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA. A Statement of Accessibility confirming this level of compliance via external audit is available on request.

When we help build websites for our customers, we strive to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. 

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template

For a breakdown of how the OpenCities platform complies with accessibility standards, please refer to our Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) document(PDF, 225KB).

Your feedback

We welcome all feedback and questions on the accessibility of our websites, content, products, and implementations.

If you experience any barriers to accessing anything we publish or using our products, please get in contact with us. We can help you get the information you are looking for and will commit to doing all we can to address any underlying roadblocks on our end.

External Accessibility Audits

Your city or council may want to undertake an external accessibility audit of your site. Please remember that while the value of these audits is a comprehensive review of any accessibility issues on your site, the reports can include genuine errors and false positives. An external review may highlight accessibility errors that fall into 4 categories:

  • Product-level issues to be included in our roadmap
  • Issues that are the best advice, not issues OpenCities sees as failures that need to be remediated or were raised in our audits with Vision Australia
  • Content-level issues that clients need to fix. For example, a content page may have an image in the body content that doesn't have alt text.
  • Theme-level issues (only applicable to theme updates performed by the OpenCities team). For issues raised for custom themes, an additional charge will be incurred for the OpenCities team to recommend and implement fixes.

You can consult with us to review the audit, but keep in mind that this will be chargeable work. A review usually takes 2+ weeks to determine which errors are genuine and what category they fall in.

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