Accessibility

Accessibility Statement

The NetSec website strives to make its content usable for everyone, including visitors who rely on assistive technology. This page documents our current conformance status, known limitations, and how to report any barriers you encounter.

Conformance status

The NetSec website (netsec-cost.eu) is designed to meet the requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA, in line with the European standard EN 301 549. Based on our most recent internal assessment, the site is partially compliant, the majority of WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria are satisfied, with the limitations listed below.

Most recent internal audit

The 22 May 2026 audit ran as part of the launch-QA pass before the public push (full plan: docs/launch-qa-2026.md in the repository). It covered the eight most-trafficked pages (home, network directory, grants, press kit, roadmap, about, FAQ, glossary) across English, French, and German variants. Results:

One WCAG 2.1 SC 1.4.3 (Contrast Minimum) issue surfaced during the audit and was fixed before this statement was published: seven primary calls-to-action in dark mode rendered white text on the lighter dark-mode accent (`#6ea1ff`) for a 2.56:1 ratio, below the 4.5:1 AA floor. The affected buttons were pinned to the EU-blue brand colour (`#003399`) in dark mode, giving 10.86:1 contrast. The fix shipped in the same release as this audit.

The remaining item flagged for manual review is colour contrast on text rendered over backdrop-filter glass surfaces, which automated tooling cannot evaluate reliably because the perceived contrast depends on what's behind the surface (the body background plus the decorative blob ambience). We verified these surfaces meet WCAG 2.1 AA contrast in both light and dark mode by inspecting computed colours element-by-element in the browser.

Three additional final-pass checks completed the launch-QA review on the same day: a structural assistive-technology audit across the four most-trafficked pages (landmarks, heading hierarchy, alt-text, accessible names, all clean); Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata verified complete on every public page; and a dark-mode readability sweep across all sixteen public English pages, with no further low-contrast text or surfaces beyond the manual-review item above. Three small corrections that surfaced during this pass are reflected in this release: the FR / DE beta-translation ribbon, which had misclaimed "machine translation", was corrected to "manual translation" (which has always been the methodology); the mobile navigation drawer's transparent background was tightened to near-opaque so the hero text no longer bleeds through behind nav items in dark mode; and the network-directory deep-link spotlight was made resilient to a requestAnimationFrame deferral edge-case that could leave a shared /people.html#<slug> link visually unhighlighted on cold page load.

Non-accessible or limited content

The following parts of the site do not yet fully meet WCAG 2.1 AA, or have constraints worth flagging:

• Roadmap Gantt chart. A dense data visualisation. On narrow viewports the chart requires horizontal scrolling; the scroll region is keyboard-focusable so users can pan with arrow keys (WCAG 2.1.1), but a text-only alternative summary is not yet provided.
• Decorative animations. Aurora background blobs and reveal-on-scroll fades are automatically disabled when the operating system or browser signals prefers-reduced-motion. We do not currently expose a separate per-site override.
• Third-party assets. Country flag thumbnails are served from flagcdn.com and headshot photos from eiss-europa.com. Their long-term availability is outside the Action's direct control; if any image becomes unavailable, the surrounding text content remains intact and informative.
• EU emblem SVG. The Funded by the European Union emblem carries an aria-label and role="img", but no long description; it is described by the surrounding boilerplate text.

We plan to address these limitations in future iterations.

Accessibility features in place

• Semantic landmarks (<header>, <nav>, <main>, <footer>) and a clean heading hierarchy without level jumps.
• Skip-to-content link visible on keyboard focus.
• Visible :focus-visible ring on every interactive control.
• alt text on every image; explicit <label for> association on every form input.
• Light and dark themes with a manual toggle in the navigation; the operating system's prefers-color-scheme is the default.
• prefers-reduced-motion disables decorative animations.
• The Management Committee by Country directory uses a native <details> accordion, fully keyboard- and screen-reader-accessible without bespoke ARIA wiring. Deep-links to specific country cards auto-expand the section.
• The Gantt grid uses ARIA grid roles (role="table", role="row", role="columnheader", role="cell") so assistive technology parses it as tabular data; the scrollable region itself is keyboard-focusable.
• Working-group membership chips on each member are grouped with role="group" and an aria-label so screen readers announce them as a group (e.g. "Working-group membership: WG1, WG3") rather than as loose tokens.
• Contact form: inline validation, accessible error reporting, and a confirmation toast announced via role="status" aria-live="polite".
• The COST logotype and EU emblem containers respect the COST Visual Identity Guide (white container, clear-space, minimum size).

Preparation of this statement

This statement was prepared by self-assessment on 22 May 2026, as part of the launch-QA pass before the public push. The website was reviewed against WCAG 2.1 AA using:

• Automated structural + a11y scans with pa11y (wrapping axe-core 4.11 and HTML_CodeSniffer) on the eight most-trafficked public pages, with collapsible regions expanded.
• Lighthouse performance + accessibility + best-practices + SEO scans on home, network directory, grants, and press kit. Accessibility scored 96-100; best practices 96; SEO 100.
• Manual contrast verification on glass surfaces and dark-mode CTAs using a per-element in-browser helper (real computed colours, not heuristic estimates). This caught the dark-mode CTA contrast issue that automated tooling under-reported.
• Structural assistive-technology audit across home, network directory, grants, and press kit: landmark roles, heading-level monotonicity (no skipped levels), image alt-text coverage, accessible names on every interactive element, label association on every input. All four pages cleared.
• Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata sweep on the home, About, roadmap, and press-kit pages, full coverage of og:type / og:title / og:description / og:url / og:image (+ width / height / alt) and the equivalent Twitter Card tags, plus a render check on the 2400×1260 shared og-image.png.
• Dark-mode readability sweep across all sixteen public English pages, with both visual review and a programmatic per-element contrast probe; no new low-contrast findings beyond the manual-review item already flagged above.
• Manual keyboard navigation through the home page, network directory, and grants page.
• A per-page broken-link sweep via the new scripts/check-links.sh (910 internal links, 56 external), caught nine anchor refs left over from the IA pass.

The audit also flagged four Lighthouse performance scores below the internal floor of 80 (range 67-75 on local + live runs), driven by render-blocking external font CSS. This is a quality-of-experience concern, not a WCAG conformance gap; it is tracked separately in the v1.5.0 roadmap.

We re-assess after material changes to the design system or content structure, and at a minimum once per year. The next scheduled review is 22 May 2027 or sooner.

Feedback and contact

If you encounter an accessibility barrier on this website, or need any of its content in an alternative format, please get in touch:

• Email the Action Chair, Dr Moritz Weiss, at moritz.weiss@gsi.lmu.de
• Or use the contact form on the home page and mention "accessibility" in your message.

We aim to respond within 10 working days.

Enforcement procedure

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may contact the equality body or accessibility-compliance body in your country. Within the European Union, each Member State designates its own enforcement body under the Web Accessibility Directive 2016/2102.

Accessibility Statement v1.2 · prepared 22 May 2026 (final pre-launch pass) · supersedes v1.1 of 22 May 2026 (launch-QA review) and v1.0 of 14 May 2026 · next scheduled review 22 May 2027.