Accessibility Is Four Statements Here, Not One Badge

Most sites publish a single accessibility page. Novus Learn publishes four, and the reason is that the product contains genuinely different formats with genuinely different constraints. A help article and a timed pattern-matrix question do not make the same demands on a reader, and a single page covering both would have to either overclaim for the hard case or underclaim for the easy one.

So the general statement covers the site as a whole, and three sections publish their own: the assessments, the career questionnaires, and the Reasoning Challenge. Each of the three says what its format assumes, which of those assumptions can be relaxed, and where an alternative route exists. Where something cannot be made equivalent, the page says so rather than leaving a reader to discover it during an attempt.

• Semantic landmarks and a heading structure that descends in order.
• A skip link and visible keyboard focus on every interactive control.
• Native modal dialogs that trap focus and return it to the control that opened them.
• Touch targets of at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels.
• Light and dark themes where no label depends on colour alone.
• System-aware reduced-motion controls that persist across visits.
• Reflow to a single column, with the fixed mobile navigation reserving its own space so nothing hides beneath it.

Every practice question across the aptitude suites, the Cognitive Skills Lab and the Reasoning Challenge is multiple choice, rendered as labelled controls. Answering, marking a question for review and submitting are all discrete button interactions. There is no drag and drop and no free drawing anywhere in an assessment, which is a deliberate constraint on the question design rather than a limitation of it: it keeps every item operable from a keyboard and from keyboard-emulating assistive devices.

Progress and scoring status are announced through polite live regions rather than through colour or motion. That matters most during a timed attempt, where a visual-only progress indicator would make the format unusable for a screen-reader user without anybody noticing.

The first is visual items. Pattern-matrix, sequence and spatial questions are inherently visual, and a text alternative complete enough to describe the pattern would also give away the answer. The Reasoning Challenge accessibility page states plainly that these item types are not equivalent for a reader who cannot see them. It keeps prompts short, avoids decoration and uses high-contrast motion-free presentation, and it does not dress any of that up as equivalence. The Language-Light forms reduce reading load, not visual load, and the page says so rather than implying otherwise.

The second is the clock. A timed attempt saves to this device as you go, so closing the tab does not destroy your work, but the deadline is enforced on the server and keeps running during an interruption. If timed conditions are the barrier, the untimed route is real and documented: the Practice Lab drills the same question families with worked explanations, and guided practice across the aptitude catalogue is untimed too.

The career accessibility page is structured as a checklist where every row carries its status and the evidence behind it, and the statuses are not all the same word. Items verified by an automated test name that test. Items that need a human keyboard-only run or a screen-reader pass are marked as pending a manual review and say so. That distinction is the whole point: an automated check can prove a fieldset exists, and it cannot prove a person can complete a hundred-question profile with a screen reader.

Two design decisions in the questionnaires are worth naming because they are accessibility decisions that do not look like one. There are no timers anywhere in the matcher, and no session expires. And every action button names the specific career family it acts on rather than saying Remove, so a screen-reader user hears which option they are about to discard.

None of these pages claims the work is finished. Automated checks cannot replace keyboard and assistive-technology testing, and the general statement says that in as many words. The release process includes browser, keyboard, zoom, reduced-motion and mobile checks, and broader screen-reader testing continues as the richer visual features grow.

If a specific item is unclear with your assistive technology, the contact page is the route, and the ask is concrete: the URL, the technology you are using, and what you heard or saw instead of what you expected. An item that cannot be fixed gets retired rather than left in place with an apology attached.