Accessibility

WCAG 2.2 at Level AA, which is the standard most Canadian public bodies work to. This site has not been formally audited against it, so treat that as the target rather than a claim.

Saskatchewan does not have accessibility legislation equivalent to Ontario's AODA. This page exists because it is the right way to run a public service site, not because a law requires it.

Everything on this site can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone. Specifically:

• A skip link is the first thing you reach on every page, jumping straight past the navigation to the content
• Focus is always visible, with a clear outline rather than a browser default that some themes hide
• The menu traps focus while it is open and Escape closes it, returning focus to the button that opened it
• Headings run in order so a screen reader can be used to navigate by structure
• Decorative elements, including the crest and the rings around it, are hidden from assistive technology rather than announced as meaningless images
• The current page is marked so it is announced, not only shown in a different colour

There is a lot of movement on this site. The background is a slow-moving field of colour, the crest turns and glows as you scroll the home page, light travels along the process steps and down the edges of the footer, and lines of type drift across the page as you move.

If your device is set to reduce motion, all of it stops. Not slowed, not softened. Every animation is named individually in the stylesheet and switched off, and nothing disappears when it does. Turn it on in your phone or computer's accessibility settings and this site will respect it.

This page is deliberately the quietest one on the site: nothing here moves while you are reading it.

Body text is set at 18px rather than the usual 16, and everything scales with your browser's text size setting rather than being locked to fixed pixels.

Text sits on a dark background throughout. Colours were chosen against the lightest point of that background rather than the average, so contrast holds everywhere rather than only in the dark areas. Red is used for rules, numerals and marks rather than for body text, and the reading text itself is set in near-white so it never depends on colour to be legible.

If your device is set to increase contrast or reduce transparency, the frosted panels turn solid and the muted greys lighten.

Plenty of members read this on rural data. The site's main typefaces are served from this site rather than a third party. Two display faces, used for headings and for the Cree syllabics, are loaded from Google Fonts, and if that connection is slow or blocked the page falls back to a font already on your device rather than showing nothing. Sections below the fold are not rendered until you approach them. Images carry their dimensions so nothing jumps around as they load.

The moving background is drawn by your device's graphics hardware, not downloaded, so it costs no data. On a device that cannot run it, it is replaced by a plain background and nothing else changes.

If the page never finishes loading for you, that is worth reporting. It is a real failure, not your connection's fault.

Every page has a print stylesheet. Printed, you get black text on white with the decoration, animation and navigation stripped out, and pages broken so sections are not split across sheets.

This matters more than it sounds. People print funding rules, take them to a kitchen table, and mark them up. The checklist prints as a clean sheet with empty boxes to tick by hand.

What you need to apply

The Nation's name appears in Cree syllabics in the header and footer, marked so a screen reader knows it is not English.

Neither of this site's own typefaces covers the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, so the syllabics were being drawn by whatever font a device happened to reach for, and the result ranged from handsome to broken depending on the phone. The site now loads Noto Sans Canadian Aboriginal directly, and falls back to Euphemia UCAS, Gadugi and BC Sans, which between them cover current Apple, Windows and Android devices.

That is an improvement rather than a guarantee. A device that cannot reach the font falls back to whatever syllabics face it already has, and serving the face from this site directly would be better still. It is on the list.

How much more of this site should be available in nêhiyawêwin is for the Nation to decide, and that work belongs with a speaker rather than with software.

Stated plainly, because a page that only lists what works is marketing:

• No formal accessibility audit has been carried out, and no testing has been done with actual screen reader users
• The syllabics font problem above
• The events calendar requires an account, so it sits behind a sign-in that has not been reviewed for accessibility. Signing in is now enough to see the general schedule, so nobody is held at a wall while they wait on approval, but the sign-in itself is still unaudited
• Some pages predate this work and have not been checked to the same standard
• No plain-language or easy-read version of the funding rules exists
• Nothing on the site is available as audio

Then do not use it. Everything here can be done by phone or in person, and no one will be disadvantaged for it.

Applications can be filled out with a staff member at the band office. Forms can be posted to you. Questions get the same answer over the phone as they do on this page, from a person who can also answer the ones the page does not cover.

Who to call

The Post-Secondary Sub-Office is responsible for this page and for accessibility across this site. Reports come in by phone or email, get logged at the office, and are answered by a person rather than a ticket queue.

This statement is reviewed when the site changes in a way that affects any claim on this page, and at least once a year otherwise.

If you reported something and nothing changed, call and say so. That is a fair thing to chase.