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
If you need information from this site in an alternative format (large print, plain text, contacted by phone), email us and we'll arrange it.
