Accessibility statement

This site publishes free, openly licensed teaching material. Material that some people cannot read is not free to them, so accessibility is part of whether this portal does its job at all — not an afterthought or a compliance exercise.

This statement describes the real state of the site as at 15 August 2026. It includes the problems we know about and have not yet fixed. We would rather tell you where the site falls short than claim a level of conformance we have not demonstrated.

What we are aiming for

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA. This is the standard referenced by European accessibility legislation and the one most partners will expect of project outputs.

Compliance status

This site is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 level AA. “Partially conformant” means most of the site meets the standard, but some content does not — the specific exceptions are listed below.

What we have checked, and what works

The following were re-checked on 15 August 2026 across all 149 pages and articles listed in our sitemaps — every one of them, rather than the sample of ten pages used in the earlier review. The exception is the last item, on colour contrast, which was measured on the site’s shared components rather than page by page:

• Every page has exactly one main heading, and the page language is declared in the markup.
• Every page has a skip-to-content link and proper landmark regions, so keyboard and screen-reader users can bypass the navigation.
• Every field in the contact forms has a programmatically associated label. This matters more than anything else here, because the contact form is the only thing on this site we ask anyone to fill in.
• Every image carries alt text. All 125 images in our articles and pages carry text rather than being left blank: on 15 August 2026 we checked every published page again and did not find a single image with a missing or empty description. Where an image contains text, a chart or a label, we aim to carry that information into the description. Every embedded slide deck has a descriptive frame title. What we can no longer tell you is that every one of those descriptions has been checked against the picture it describes — see the known problems below.
• No link or button was found without an accessible name, and no vague “click here” link text.
• Pinch-zoom is not disabled, and nothing forces itself out of the natural keyboard order.
• Two colour-contrast failures found in a July 2026 review — in the hero button and in the navigation hover state — were corrected.

Known problems we have not fixed

These are real and current. If one of them affects you, please tell us — it moves the item up the list.

• The video on the home page starts by itself and cannot be paused. The hero on the home page carries a silent video that begins on its own, runs for about twenty seconds and then repeats. WCAG 2.1 asks for a way to pause anything that moves automatically for longer than five seconds (success criterion 2.2.2, level A). There is no pause control, so this is a failure of the standard and not merely a rough edge. The video is illustrative: it shows microgreens growing in trays and carries nothing you cannot read in the text beside it. It does not start at all if your system is set to reduce motion, if you are on a narrow screen, or if your connection is metered or slow. If it gets in your way, write to us and we will change it.
• One embedded video. There is a single video embedded on the site from a third-party platform: a TikTok clip on one recipe page. We did not produce it and have not verified whether it carries accurate captions. The YouTube video this item used to describe is no longer embedded here — it is now an ordinary outbound link.
• The pop-up contact form has not been tested with assistive technology. The “Contact us” button in the header opens the contact form in an overlay. We have confirmed it is completely hidden from keyboard and screen-reader users while closed, but we have not tested how it behaves once open — whether focus moves into it correctly and stays there. We do know that the overlay is not marked up as a dialogue and carries no name of its own, so even when it is open it will not be announced as one. Until we have tested it, the contact page carries the same form as an ordinary page, and that is the route we recommend.
• Most image descriptions have not been checked against the picture itself. Every image has a description, but on 15 August 2026 we were able to open and look at only 18 of the 125 images in our articles and pages — the ones used on more than one page, and the ones whose file names were most likely to have misled whoever wrote the description. Four of those descriptions had been written from the file name or the article title and described things that are not in the photograph: a picture of a classroom presentation was described as growing diaries and trays on three separate pages, and a picture of two empty trays was described as red amaranth. All four were corrected, together with a fifth that was accurate but too brief to be useful. The rest are specific and plausible, but they have not been checked by eye, and until they are we cannot tell you that all of them are accurate. We have also stopped quoting a figure for the number of featured images, because that count has not been re-checked.
• Twelve pages jump from the main heading straight to a level-3 or level-4 heading. This is the same kind of gap in the document outline as the one above, but it is in the text of those pages rather than in the theme, so nothing but our own editing stands in the way of fixing it. We found it on 15 August 2026 and have not corrected it yet.
• Colour contrast has not been checked exhaustively. We checked the site’s shared components and templates, not every one of the 120-plus articles individually.

Content we do not control

The four teaching toolkits are published as slide decks hosted on Google Slides and embedded here. We have labelled each frame so it is announced properly, but the accessibility of the Google Slides viewer itself is not ours to change. We also host 374 research papers as PDF files in The Original Papers. These are the publishers’ own files, republished unaltered under their open licences. Many scientific PDFs are not tagged for screen readers, and some are little more than page images. We cannot repair them without altering files we have undertaken to keep exactly as their authors published them. So we did the next best thing: every paper also has an ordinary web page carrying its title, authors, journal, abstract, licence and citation as real text. The substance of each paper can be read, searched and quoted without opening the PDF at all.

If a toolkit is not usable for you in that format, ask us and we will send you the content in another one. Our material is published under CC BY 4.0, so we are free to give it to you however you need it, at no cost and with no conditions attached.

How we assessed this site

This statement was prepared on 28 July 2026 by self-assessment. We ran automated checks across ten representative pages and the full article set, then reviewed the results by hand — discarding several that turned out to be artefacts of the testing method rather than real defects, and keeping the ones listed above. The research archive published in August 2026 was checked the same way: its search page, and a sample of record pages spanning every licence type. Two faults found there — filter menus with no spoken name, and a result count that changed without being announced — were fixed before that section went live. On 15 August 2026 we re-ran the markup checks across every published page and article rather than a sample of ten, and separately downloaded and looked at 18 of the image files to see whether their descriptions matched the pictures. What both passes found is reflected in the two lists above, including where it made the list of known problems longer.

What we have not done, and you should know it: this site has not been audited by an independent accessibility specialist, and it has not been tested by disabled people using their own assistive technology. Automated tools detect only a minority of accessibility barriers — they are good at spotting a missing label and bad at judging whether a page actually makes sense to use. A clean automated result is not the same as an accessible site, and we are not presenting it as one.

Tell us about a problem

If something on this site blocks you, or if you need a page or a toolkit in a different format — larger text, plain text, an accessible document, or something else — write to erasmus@evec.org.gr and tell us what you were trying to do and what got in the way. A real person reads it, and we aim to reply within five working days.

You do not need to identify the technical cause or quote a guideline. “I could not get past the form on this page” is a complete and useful report.

We will keep this statement current as things change — including when the list of known problems gets shorter.

Last reviewed 15 August 2026. Changed on 15 August 2026: the heading gap around the “Related Posts” block at the foot of every article was fixed — that block is now a level-2 heading and the article titles inside it are level-3, so the outline no longer skips a level, and we have checked two articles to confirm it; the checks behind the list above were re-run across every published page and article instead of a sample of ten; the number of images in our articles and pages was corrected from 91 to 125 after a full recount, and the figure we used to quote for featured images was withdrawn because it has not been re-counted; four image descriptions that had been written from a file name or an article title rather than from the picture were rewritten; two problems we had not disclosed were added to the list of known problems — that most image descriptions have not been checked against their pictures, and that twelve pages skip a heading level in their own text; the single embedded video is a TikTok clip, the YouTube embed described here before having since been replaced by a plain link; and the reason given for the “Related Posts” heading gap was corrected, because that heading level is a setting in our theme rather than a limitation of it. Changed on 12 August 2026: a video was added to the home page hero, and because it starts on its own and has no pause control it has been added to the list of known problems above rather than left unmentioned. Changed on 6 August 2026: the research archive, The Original Papers, was added, assessed and described above, including what we can and cannot do about the accessibility of the PDF files themselves. Changed since first publication: all images across the site were given written alt text, so the previously listed problem of images marked as decorative without review no longer applies; nineteen images that had been loading from another domain were brought into this site, which also gave them proper descriptions.