Accessibility

An accessible platform is not a single deliverable; it is a shared responsibility. The platform controls the editing interface — the buttons, panels, and dialogs editors work in. Your space controls the published site, which is built from your templates and content. CTXR guarantees the first and equips you for the second, and it is worth being honest about where that line falls.

Two scopes

The editor chrome — everything CTXR ships as the editing experience — is the platform’s responsibility, and it is built to standard out of the box. The site content that visitors see is your space’s responsibility, produced through templates and the platform’s helpers. The helpers make the accessible path the easy path, but they cannot force every template to be perfect; that part is yours.

What the platform guarantees in the editor

The editing interface holds a baseline that does not depend on a mouse:

  • Keyboard operation throughout — Tab and Shift+Tab to move, Enter and Space to activate, Escape to dismiss, arrow keys within composite controls.
  • Focus management that follows intent — opening a panel moves focus to its first meaningful action; closing it returns focus to whatever opened it, so keyboard users never lose their place.
  • ARIA semantics on interactive elements, so assistive technology announces controls correctly.
  • WCAG-AA colour contrast baked into the design tokens, in both light and dark themes.
  • Reduced-motion respect — when a visitor’s system asks for less motion, animation is dialled back accordingly.

What the platform equips your space with

For the published site, the platform supplies the tools that make accessibility the default outcome:

  • Mandatory alt text on upload, with an explicit escape hatch to mark an image as decorative — so the choice is always conscious rather than skipped.
  • A skip-link helper, so keyboard and screen-reader users can jump past repeated navigation straight to content.
  • The same AA-contrast tokens and reduced-motion handling, available to your templates as well.

Automated checks, honestly framed

Some checks are already structural: contrast is computed against the AA tokens, alt text is enforced at upload, and the skip-link helper is one call away. A fuller automated gate — running axe-core and Lighthouse against rendered pages, configurable per space as a warning or a hard block — is in development, arriving with the deploy pipeline that ships the headless runner. Either way, treat automation as a safety net, not a certificate.

Automated tooling catches roughly the first 30–40% of accessibility issues — missing alt text, contrast failures, absent labels. The remainder — meaningful reading order, sensible focus flow, whether a control is actually understandable — requires human judgement. Passing the checks means you have cleared the floor, not that the site is accessible.