Accessibility Statement

Accessibility statement for Research Methods

This accessibility statement applies to the Research Methods course website hosted at smithlabdurham.github.io/methods.

This website is run by the Department of Earth Sciences, Durham University. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website. You should be able to:

  • navigate most of the website using a keyboard
  • read the content comfortably at 200% zoom
  • use the website with a screen reader

Conformance status

This website aims to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, Level AA. It is partially conformant — most content meets the standard, but some areas have known limitations.

Known limitations

  1. Interactive code editors. The exercise pages use Quarto Live to run R code in the browser via WebR. The embedded code editors (CodeMirror) have reasonable keyboard support, but their accessibility with screen readers has not been fully tested.

  2. Dynamically generated figures. Plots produced by R code running in the browser do not have alt text. Static figures rendered at build time include alt text via fig-alt.

  3. Reveal.js slides. The slide decks (under “Slides” in the navigation) use Reveal.js. Keyboard navigation works, but some assistive technologies may have difficulty with slide transitions and incremental content reveals.

  4. Deliberately misleading exemplar charts. The traitor policy briefing (an exemplar used in the Week 4 teaching exercise) contains intentionally misleading visualisations, including a pie chart that relies on colour alone to distinguish categories. This is a pedagogical choice — the teaching notes explicitly critique the chart as an example of poor practice. All such figures include descriptive alt text that conveys the equivalent information.

  5. Staff pages. Some instructor-facing pages are encrypted with StatiCrypt. The decryption prompt may not be fully accessible to screen readers.

Feedback

If you have difficulty accessing any part of this website, please contact the module convenor by email. We will do our best to provide the content in an accessible format.

Enforcement procedure

If you are not happy with our response, you can contact the Equality Advisory Support Service (EASS).

Technical information

This website is built with Quarto and hosted on GitHub Pages. It uses the Bootstrap 5 “Flatly” theme, which provides a baseline level of accessibility including semantic HTML, keyboard focus indicators, and responsive layout. Custom colours used in slide decks and exercise pages have been tested for WCAG AA contrast compliance.

Preparation of this statement

This statement was prepared on 31 March 2026, based on an LLM review of the site content against WCAG 2.1 Level AA criteria.