Accessibility

Commitment to Accessibility

Accessibility is a top priority for us and we are always striving to ensure that our platform follows the highest accessibility standards and best practices. We do this, for instance, by making sure that all questionnaire elements have been coded accordingly, and that screen readers and other assistive technology can help respondents in filling out questionnaires.

We view developing an accessible Maptionnaire service as a process, as there is always room for improvement. Accessibility standards and assistive web technologies are constantly changing, and as such we cannot always ensure that we have been able to build everything in a way that would guarantee the best experience. We are, however, committed to the process and want to remove accessibility barriers wherever possible. We therefore welcome all feedback and suggestions for improvement; feel free to send us a message at support@maptionnaire.com.

Guidelines and Standards

Maptionnaire follows the W3C standard and practices for developing web services. Maptionnaire follows the EU Accessibility Directive and commits to implementing level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG2.1) developed by the W3C.

Exceptions and Level of Accessibility

Background maps and other web-based map services are not compatible with assistive technology.  Due to this map-based parts of Maptionnaire are inherently incompatible with certain accessibility tools such as screen readers. This is an issue that we at Maptionnaire unfortunately cannot work around, and for this reason, the EU Accessibility Directive and the Finnish Act on the Provision of Digital Services explicitly exempt map-based web services.

Maptionnaire aims to make the non-map related parts of the service accessible within the guidelines and standards outlined above. In particular, questionnaire pages and elements should be available to screen readers, and questionnaires should support keyboard-based navigation, including maps where possible. Maptionnaire service features are customizable and clients can inadvertently produce poorly accessible styles. To mitigate this, we ensure proper default values and provide suitable color palettes.