Accessibility — CKSTEM

Our commitment

CKSTEM aims for our marketing site (www.competitivekids.org), our contest hub (cic.competitivekids.org), and our learning platform (learn.competitivekids.org) to be accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities. We work toward conformance with WCAG 2.1 Level AA and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) standards.

What we do

Keyboard navigation — every interactive element on this site can be reached and operated with a keyboard.
Skip-to-content link — appears as the first focusable element on every page.
Visible focus rings — keyboard focus is always visible (orange outline matching brand).
Semantic HTML — headings, landmarks, lists, and form labels are used correctly.
Colour contrast — body text meets WCAG AA contrast minimums (4.5:1).
Reduced-motion support — animations respect prefers-reduced-motion.
Alt text — images carry meaningful alternative text or are marked decorative.

What we're working on

Full Lighthouse + axe-core audit before our public launch.
Screen-reader testing on the contest registration flow.
Captions for any future video content on the marketing site.

Known limitations

The Moodle learning platform is a third-party system. We monitor its accessibility and report issues upstream.
Stripe-hosted checkout pages follow Stripe's accessibility practices, not ours.
Contest results published as PDFs may not be fully tagged for screen readers — we're transitioning to HTML results pages on cic.competitivekids.org.

Reporting accessibility issues

If you find something that doesn't work for you, please tell us — we want to fix it. Email info@ckstem.org with the subject line "Accessibility issue". Include:

The page URL.
What you were trying to do.
What happened (or didn't happen).
The assistive technology you were using (if applicable).

We aim to respond within 5 business days and to fix WCAG AA blockers within 30 days.

Alternative formats