Accessibility

Postulo is meant to be usable by everyone, at its fullest, including people with disabilities. That is one of the project's stated commitments, not a feature; this page says what it means in practice, what is checked, what is known not to be, and how to tell us about a barrier.

What you can expect

• The choices that change how Postulo behaves for you have an address. Settings → Accessibility holds them: the order number on a career entry for somebody who cannot use the arrows, the switch that turns the single-key shortcuts off, and whether the link for the page you are on is underlined — off leaves it shaded and in bolder type, so it is never marked by colour alone, and a high-contrast theme underlines it whatever you chose. Reduced motion, more contrast and Windows High Contrast are read from your operating system, which is the setting you already made once for everything, so they are not repeated there. The page also says what Postulo is checked against and links here, so it is where to start when something does not work for you.
• Everything works from the keyboard. Every control can be reached in a sensible order and operated with Enter, Space and the arrow keys; a Skip to content link is the first thing Tab reaches; menus open and close with Enter and Escape; focus is always visible. Sorting a table, turning a page and switching the theme leave focus on the control you pressed, rather than dropping it back to the top of the page.
• Focus is visible in a high-contrast theme too. Windows High Contrast and the equivalent elsewhere throw away the colours a page chose, which took the border and the ring that Postulo's fields used to show focus with and left nothing. Every field now draws an outline in your own system's highlight colour.
• Everything works without scripts. The pages are server-rendered HTML. Scripts add convenience — the table narrowing as you type, the password meter, the theme applying before the server confirms it — and every one of them has a plain button that does the same thing.
• Each language names itself, and says so. The language menu lists every language under its own name, and each entry is marked with the language it is in, so a screen reader pronounces it properly rather than reading Greek with English rules. How well translated each one is appears as a heading over the group rather than inside the entry.
• Screen readers are told what changes. Counts that update, the password meter's word, a search result summary and the messages after an action are live regions. Icons that stand alone have names; icons beside words are marked decorative. Tables have headers, sortable ones say which way they are sorted.
• Colour never carries a meaning on its own. A status has its label; the strength meter has its word; a quiet application says so in text.
• The page follows the direction of the language it is in. In a right-to-left language the whole interface flips — headings, action buttons, the board's columns, the timeline's rule, the menus, the skip link. See Right to left below.
• Text and contrast. Both themes are checked for contrast at the AA level. Text resizes with the browser; nothing is locked to a pixel size.
• Motion. The little animation there is respects prefers-reduced-motion.
• Things you click are big enough to hit. Every button, link and switch is at least 24 by 24 pixels, or else has that much clear space around it. This matters most on a phone, with a tremor, or with any pointer that is not a mouse on a desk.
• Nothing scrolls sideways, in any language. At 320 pixels — the width a normal window has at 400% zoom — every page reads in one column, top to bottom, in Greek and German as well as in English, and no sentence is squeezed into a strip beside a button. Only a data table scrolls across, in its own box, because a table needs its two dimensions to mean anything.
• A rejected form says why, to a screen reader too. When a field is refused, the control is marked invalid and points at the message explaining it, so the reason is read out with the field rather than sitting in red where only eyes can find it.
• A single key does nothing you cannot switch off. Postulo has three one-character shortcuts — d and j on the capture review, / for the search box — and they are switched off in one place, Settings → Accessibility → Keyboard shortcuts. This matters most if you dictate to your computer, because speech recognition presses every letter of every sentence and d discards a listing. Shortcuts that need Ctrl are not affected. Keys pressed while an input method is composing a character belong to the character.
• Every page is named by its own heading. The first heading on a page is that page's name, not the name of the area it sits in, so jumping heading by heading tells you where you are; the headings below it step down one level at a time.

What is checked, and how

Every page the browser test suite visits is run through axe-core against WCAG 2.2 at levels A and AA on every push; a violation fails the build and names the element and the rule. That covers what a machine can check. Using the pages with a keyboard alone, and with NVDA and VoiceOver, is done by hand and is the part most likely to find what axe cannot; findings become bugs with the accessibility label.

Every page a person can reach is on that list, and that is now enforced rather than remembered: a separate test walks the application's own URL table and fails unless each one is either visited by the browser suite or named with a reason it is not a page — a file download, a form submission, a redirect. Adding a page without deciding about it breaks the build.

Size is measured rather than read. axe-core does not enforce Target Size (Minimum) — it reports the rule as needing review rather than as a violation — so the suite above was returning a clean result on pages carrying sixty-two buttons that were 22 pixels square. A second browser test now asks every clickable thing on every one of those pages for its box and holds it to 24 by 24, allowing the criterion's own exceptions: a small target with 24 pixels of clear space around it, a checkbox measured by the label that switches it, and a link inside a sentence, whose height belongs to the prose it sits in. What it cannot judge is whether some other control does the same job at full size; that needs a person, and anything relying on it has to be written down.

References are resolved, which is a third thing a machine can check and axe does not. Every aria-describedby on every page is looked up against the document, and any that names an element which is not there fails the build. That was the state of every form Postulo drew itself: Django marks a refused field aria-invalid and points it at its error, correctly, and the template drew that error without the id the field was pointing at. The control announced that it was invalid and that two elements described it, and neither existed. The forms are also submitted empty on purpose, because a page that has never been refused has no errors to point at and the half of the bug that matters would never be reached.

Width is measured too, and by the same method: at 320 CSS pixels a third browser test asks each page to scroll sideways and fails if it moves. That is the criterion's own question — Reflow, level AA — and it is not one axe can answer, because it is about layout at a width rather than about a document. Nothing had ever looked at these pages narrow, and every one of them scrolled, by an identical 331 pixels: a single row of navigation links that did not care how wide the window was. The failure names the element rather than the page, because that is the difference between a fix and a search.

The walk is taken in three languages: English, Greek and German. A page is made of translated words, and a word that cannot break is as wide as its language makes it. While the walk was English only, the dashboard's arrange page fitted with seven pixels to spare on one machine and was eight over on another, and in Greek it was 64 over on every machine. Greek and German are there because they drew widest of the European catalogues where they were measured.

It also asks a second question, of every box that holds words: do they fit inside it? A row of words beside buttons that will not give way does not scroll when it fails — it hands the words whatever width is left over. On the arrange page that was a column one word wide, with the longest written across the arrows; each built-in plugin's description got six pixels. The page was exactly as wide as the screen, and half of it could not be read.

It is worth being plain about the limit of the automated half. The sign-in page passed every one of those checks, in both themes, while being rendered with no styling at all: the markup was correct, the labels were associated, black on white has ample contrast, and the button was a button. What it did not have was any visual signal that a failed sign-in was an error, any weight on its headings, or anything to make a control look like one. A machine cannot see that, so a separate test now checks that Postulo's own stylesheet reaches those pages at all, and looking at them remains the other half of the job.

Right to left

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu are read right to left, and a page in one of them has to be laid out that way — not merely have its text reversed inside a left-to-right shell.

What flips. Everything that names an edge: the action buttons at the end of a heading row, the timeline rule beside the event log, the menus that hang from a corner, the skip link, table alignment, and the board's columns, so the earliest status is the one nearest where you start reading. Icons that point sideways are mirrored; ones that point up or down are not, because they mean the same thing either way.

What does not flip. Text that is not in your language. A company called Aperture Science stays Latin and stays left-to-right inside an Arabic line, and so do email addresses, web addresses, version numbers, package names and checksums. They are isolated so the punctuation around them stays where it belongs — without that, a separator jumps to the wrong end of the line and the row reads as nonsense.

A document has its own direction. A CV or a cover letter is laid out for the language it is written in, not for the language you read Postulo in. Somebody using Postulo in Arabic who writes an English CV gets an English, left-to-right PDF; the reverse holds too. That is what the language field on a CV and a letter decides, along with hyphenation and how a screen reader pronounces it.

How it is checked. The browser suite visits the application in a right-to-left language, in both themes, and runs axe over it; it also measures that the action buttons, the board and the skip link actually moved rather than merely being labelled as though they had. A separate lint refuses any stylesheet class that names a left or a right, which is what stops this drifting back one heading row at a time.

No right-to-left language is offered yet. The layout work is done and tested first, so that the language can be added as a catalogue and nothing else.

The documents Postulo renders

They are tagged. A CV, a portfolio, a cover letter and a report all come out as PDF/UA: they carry a tag tree, so the headings are headings, a screen reader can move between them, and whatever reads the file back — a recruiter's software as much as a person's — gets the text in the order it is meant to be read in rather than the order it happened to be drawn in. The language field on the document reaches a reader through that tree, which is what makes it worth declaring. The fallback renderer, headless Chromium, is asked for the same thing and for an outline besides.

Each document names its author in the file's properties, taken from the contact block. A CV with its contact details switched off names nobody there either: leaving your name off a CV on purpose does not mean leaving it on in the metadata.

Deliberately not PDF/A. PDF/A is tagged too, and archival besides, but it is a promise that the file will still render identically in decades — kept by embedding an output colour profile and every font the document uses. A theme a plugin ships names fonts that are whatever the server happens to have, so Postulo cannot make that promise for every document it renders, and a conformance claim it cannot honour would be worse than one it never made.

Known gaps

• Colour contrast in the brand accent on dark backgrounds is checked by tooling only; if it reads badly to you, say so.

Telling us

A feature somebody cannot use is a bug. Open an issue on the repository with the page, what you were trying to do, and the assistive technology you use, or write to the maintainer if you would rather not open a public issue. It will be treated as a bug, not a request.