Version: 2026-09-21
Commitment & Target
Our target standard for volarelanguage.com is WCAG 2.1, Level AA. That’s the standard we design and build against. In September 2026 we completed an audit against this standard — see “How It’s Tested” below — and addressed the issues it found. We believe the platform now substantially meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and it remains the bar every new piece of the platform is built to meet.
What’s Built for Accessibility
A text alternative to every flipbook. Each book’s reader can carry a plain-text version of the title alongside the page-flip view, exposed as a “Read this book as text” toggle. This isn’t a setting a teacher can turn off — there’s no control anywhere for a teacher to disable it, and no teacher setting decides whether it’s offered. Whether that toggle appears for a given title depends on whether we’ve uploaded that title’s text file when we published it: where it’s uploaded, the toggle is there for every reader of that book; where it isn’t yet uploaded, the toggle simply doesn’t render for that title, and our own publishing screen flags any title still missing its text version so we can follow up on it. In short: the infrastructure is universal and not teacher-switchable, but per-title text-version coverage is a publishing task that’s ongoing rather than fully complete for every title in the catalog today.
A non-drag route for drag-and-drop activities. The drag-and-drop and matching activity types are built on H5P’s DragText content type, a widely used, actively maintained H5P library that ships its own click-or-keyboard alternative to dragging — so a student who can’t or doesn’t want to drag can still complete the activity by clicking or using a keyboard. This accessibility behavior comes from the H5P library itself rather than custom code we’ve written, but it’s the mechanism actually in place for every drag-and-drop and matching activity on the platform. NOTE: Activities are forthcoming as of September 21, 2026.
Text sits on accessible-contrast colors. volarelanguage.com’s color system deliberately separates fill-only colors (used for backgrounds, badges, and decorative accents) from the colors approved for carrying text: headings and brand text use navy, body text uses a near-black ink tone chosen for higher contrast than navy, and the one warm accent color approved for text is a contrast-checked teal. Text is not set in any of the fill-only colors reserved for decoration. We checked contrast across the platform’s screens as part of the audit described below, and the token system itself is built around that constraint rather than an afterthought.
Ongoing
Each new title we publish is meant to ship with its text version alongside the page-flip reader from the start, closing the remaining gap described above over time. Each new video we add is meant to ship with captions. These are the standards we’re building toward for new content going forward, not a claim that every piece of existing content already meets them.
How It’s Tested
We test in this order: automated accessibility checks first (to catch structural and contrast issues at scale), then a keyboard-only pass through the platform’s key flows (joining a class, reading a book, completing an activity), then a manual pass with a screen reader. We completed this full pass in September 2026: automated checks with axe-core across the public pages, the teacher dashboard, the reader, and the activities, followed by manual keyboard-only and screen-reader review. We fixed the issues it surfaced — including contrast adjustments and making the book reader’s page-flip controls reachable and operable by keyboard — and are still refining a couple of minor control labels in the third-party page-flip viewer. We re-test as we add new features, and we’ll note any material change here.
Feedback
If you run into an accessibility barrier anywhere on volarelanguage.com — a book, an activity, the dashboard, or anything else — we want to know about it. Contact us at kristy@placidolanguage.com with what you found and, if you can, what page or activity it was on. We’ll look into it and let you know what we can do. We will prioritize accessibility requests for students who are actively depending on them!