Accessibility

What VGSpartans does to stay usable for everyone, the settings you can change yourself, and how to tell us when something is in your way.

CommitmentFor everyoneLast updated August 4, 2026

VGSpartans is a school platform, so it has to work for everyone at the school. This page says what we hold ourselves to, what you can change yourself, and what is still not good enough.

The standard we build to

We target WCAG 2.2, Levels A and AA. That is the current version of the international guideline for making web content usable by people with disabilities, and AA is the level most institutions treat as the bar.

We check part of it automatically. Every time the code changes, an automated tool loads the main public pages and fails the build if it finds problems it can detect: text that is too low contrast to read, buttons with no name a screen reader can announce, form fields with no label, broken page structure.

Being honest about that check: tools like it catch roughly a third of real accessibility problems. They cannot tell whether the tab order makes sense, whether a page is understandable, or whether someone using a screen reader can actually finish what they came to do. A passing check means we have not broken the machine-checkable part. It does not mean we are done.

Settings you can change

Every page has an Accessibility button in the top bar, next to the light/dark switch. It is there on the main site, in the consoles, on club sites, in the handbook, and on every platform. Saved on your device and carried across the whole of VGSpartans:

Language. Switch between English and Spanish. It appears on pages that exist in both languages; on pages that do not, it is hidden rather than offering you a link to something that is not there.
Motion. Turn off animations, page transitions and scrolling effects.
Transparency. Replace the frosted panels behind menus and bars with solid ones.
Text size. Two steps larger than the default.

The last three start on Match my device, which means we follow the accessibility settings you have already set on your phone or computer. Changing a setting here overrides that just for VGSpartans; setting it back to “Match my device” hands control back to your device.

Two reasons this exists rather than leaving it to your device settings. Some browsers, Safari and Safari on iPhone in particular, do not yet tell websites that you asked to reduce transparency, so a site cannot honour it without a control of its own. And if you are on a school-managed Chromebook, you often cannot change the device settings at all.

Your browser’s own zoom still works and still matters. The text-size steps here are for comfort; if you need text much larger, browser zoom goes further and every page is built to reflow when you use it.

These settings are kept in this browser and not on an account, so they are not something we hold about you, they do not follow you to another device, and anyone else who uses this device gets them too. Each one holds the setting and nothing else, and clearing them puts every setting back to following your device. The Privacy Policy is exact about what is stored, and it is the reason this site has no cookie banner to click past.

About the language

If your browser or phone is set to Spanish, the first time you arrive we send you to the Spanish version of the page you asked for, where one exists. It happens once: after that you are in charge, through the language control. That is deliberate, so that someone can send you an English link and you can stay on it if that is what you want.

Not all of the site is translated yet. What is not stays in English, and the language control does not appear on those pages.

What is built in

Every page has a “Skip to content” link as the first thing you reach with the Tab key, so you do not have to tab through the whole menu on every page.
A clear, high-contrast focus outline on whatever you have selected with the keyboard.
Animations respect your device’s reduce-motion setting.
Panels go solid under your device’s reduce-transparency, high-contrast and forced-colours settings, and when printing.
Page structure uses real headings and landmarks, and images carry text descriptions.
Menus and tab strips are operable with the arrow keys, not just the mouse.

Where we fall short

An accessibility page with no gaps on it is not being straight with you. These are the ones we know about:

The automated check covers one page per layout, not every page. Several public pages are not scanned.
Only part of the site is in Spanish. The policies and the main pages come first; the developer handbook is still English only.
The floating help bubble is a component from another company, loaded inside our pages. We have not been able to measure it the way we measure our own.
We have no automated test for keyboard order or for whether a screen reader can complete a task. Those are checked by hand, which means they are checked less often.
The site footer’s headings skip a level.
With reduced transparency on, one decorative background tint still shows through in a few dark sections. The panels themselves do go solid.

We have not had the platform audited by an outside accessibility specialist, and we have not tested it with every screen reader. We would rather say that than imply a level of assurance we do not have.

Telling us something is wrong

If something on VGSpartans is hard or impossible for you to use, please tell us. You do not need to know the technical reason, and you do not need an account.

The report page takes it with or without an account.
If it is about your own account, or you want to stay in a conversation until it is sorted, open a ticket from Support.

Tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and what got in the way. If you use assistive technology, naming it helps us reproduce the problem. We treat access problems as bugs, not as requests.

For developers

The engineering detail, including what the automated suite covers and how the preference layer is built, is in the handbook: Accessibility and Languages and translation.