Accessibility involves making websites easier to use for persons with disabilities (such as vision and physical impairments). Accessibility laws require that a person with disabilities be able to use a website with software that reads aloud the site's content and/or using only a keyboard.
Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) is committed to making our platform as accessible as possible, and making it easier for you to maintain accessibility-compliance in your Vanilla community throughout its lifespan.
Accessibility information
Vanilla provides the following links as a courtesy to aid you in being accessibility-compliant. We encourage you to:
- become familiar with these regulations and policies,
- use the appropriate guidelines to ensure your community sites are accessible, and
- periodically review the applicable guidelines for updates.
📝 NOTE: Vanilla is not responsible for the content of the following links.
📝 NOTE: Higher Logic believes Vanilla to be Section 508 and WCAG Level AA compliant.
Accessibility measures
Vanilla takes the following measures to ensure compliance in our interface. Feel free to use these measures as a starting point for your accessibility program.
📝 NOTE: If you notice an area in which Vanilla could improve its accessibility, please contact Vanilla Support (support@vanillaforums.com) or file an issue.
- Our default user interface is primarily text-based and high-contrast.
- Our interface is keyboard-friendly.
- We limit the use of colors, images, and symbols as navigation aids and as primary content.
- We use modern HTML5 markup and accessible forms.
📝 NOTE: Vanilla does not regulate the content of customers' Vanilla communities and cannot control the accessibility of user-generated content therein.
Accessibility in your theme
Most Vanilla communities have a customized theme. Keep in mind that customizations can have a large, and possibly detrimental, impact on the accessibility of the community.
The choices of fonts, font colours, and font sizes are obvious considerations, but because our theming engine also allows for the override of HTML markup, it’s important to consider that individual communities may vary wildly in their degree of accessibility.
Conversely, themes can also augment the interface to improve Vanilla’s core accessibility.
Further reading