Accessibility Statement

Our commitment

Ardent Africa exists so that anyone can back a cause, sign a petition, find work, or reach a community. That promise is empty if the platform locks people out. We are committed to making it usable with a keyboard, with a screen reader, at high zoom, and without relying on colour alone. This page is an honest account rather than a badge: it tells you what we have verified, and what we already know is not good enough.

Conformance status

Our target is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA. We are currently PARTIALLY CONFORMANT: most of the platform meets that bar, and the specific gaps listed below do not. We are not claiming full conformance, because it would not be true.

What we have verified

• Every page starts with a Skip to main content link, so keyboard users can jump past the header instead of tabbing through it each time.
• Keyboard focus is always visible. Every interactive element shows a focus ring in both light and dark mode.
• Images carry alternative text, and images that are purely decorative are correctly hidden from screen readers.
• Each page has a single main landmark that screen readers and the skip link can target.
• The interface reflows down to small screens and can be zoomed. We never block pinch-zoom.
• The page language is set correctly in each of our five languages, so screen readers use the right voice and pronunciation.
• Text, buttons, icons and progress bars meet the contrast standard, including our gold brand colour. Gold on dark backgrounds stays gold; on light backgrounds it uses a deeper shade that stays readable. That deeper shade applies to icons, button outlines and funding bars too, not just to words.
• Every form control, including search boxes and filters, is announced with its label, so you know what a control does before you change it.
• Links inside paragraphs are underlined, not just coloured, so they do not depend on being able to tell two colours apart.
• If your device is set to reduce motion, we respect it: animations are dropped and the scrolling notice at the top of the page stops. That notice can also be paused with a button, using a keyboard, whatever your motion setting.
• If your system is set to High Contrast, your colours win rather than ours. The parts that were drawn with our background colours, the funding bars, the category chips and the on/off switches, now use your system colours instead, so they stay visible rather than turning black on black. If you have asked your system for more contrast instead, our borders, focus rings and placeholder text get stronger.

Where our checks fall short

Automated checks now pass across our main pages, but passing them is a floor, not a finish line. We would rather tell you where our testing is thin than let you assume it is even:

• Automated tools are good at text contrast and unreliable at everything else that carries meaning by colour: icons, progress bars, chips and outlines. We recently found and fixed a batch of these by hand, on pages the automated checks had been passing all along. Others may remain.
• We have now measured the signed-in dashboard the same way we measure the public pages, and fixed what it turned up. Pages that only appear in particular situations, such as an error state or a screen that needs a specific kind of account, are still checked by hand and less often.
• The Ardent Africa mobile app is a separate build and has not had the same audit as the website. Treat the two as tested to different depths.

How we assessed this

We test the platform with axe-core, an automated accessibility engine, against WCAG 2.1 A and AA on our main pages, alongside manual keyboard and screen reader checks. Automated testing cannot catch everything: it is good at contrast and missing labels, and poor at judging whether a page makes sense. That is why the feedback route below matters more than any score we could publish.

Tell us when we get it wrong

If any part of Ardent Africa blocks you, we want to hear about it, and we would rather have a rough report than none. Tell us what you were trying to do, the page you were on, and what happened. If you use assistive technology, telling us which one helps us reproduce it. Opening a support ticket is the fastest route and does not require an account: it reaches our team directly and you get a reply by email.

You can also email us at support@ardentafrica.com