Accessibility Statement

Our Commitment to Accessibility

NJ Civil Service Navigator is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We continually improve the user experience for everyone and apply relevant accessibility standards.

Standards

We aim to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA. These guidelines explain how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities.

Features

• Full keyboard navigation support
• Screen reader compatible markup with ARIA labels
• High contrast dark mode
• Resizable text without loss of functionality
• Descriptive link text and alt attributes on images

How contrast is actually checked

Stating a conformance target is easy and worth very little on its own, so here is the mechanism. Colour contrast on this site is measured by an automated audit that loads real pages in a real browser, walks every text node, computes the ratio against the background actually painted behind it, and fails the build if a single node falls below the AA threshold. It runs at zero tolerance, not at a percentage.

It runs three times, over both the light and the dark theme, because there are three genuinely different renderings to check. The pre-hydration pass measures the static HTML a page ships with before any JavaScript executes. The desktop pass measures the same pages after the application has mounted, which is a different stylesheet. The mobile pass measures them again at a phone viewport, where different components render. A failure can exist in one of those three and not the other two, which is how a whole set of dark-mode link colours once sat below threshold while the audit reported clean: the pass that would have caught it was not being run.

What that discipline changed

Two rules came out of it and are now enforced in the stylesheet. Text colour and surface colour are treated as separate roles, because a colour chosen so that dark text reads on it is not a colour that white text reads on, and using one token for both is how a badge ends up at a ratio of 1.5 to 1. And opacity is never used to fade text: it composites toward whatever is behind it after the colour was chosen for contrast, silently undoing the choice. Where text needs to look secondary it is given a lighter colour that was itself measured.

The audit covers the large generated page families as well as the hand-built ones, since a template applied to thousands of rows is where a single bad token does the most damage. Adding the regulation and statute pages to the checked list is what surfaced a real failure in a shared panel style that had never been measured.

Motion, keyboard and structure

Animation respects the operating system's reduced-motion preference: when it is set, transitions and entrance animations are suppressed rather than merely shortened. Every interactive control is reachable by keyboard, and the site adds keyboard shortcuts on top of that rather than in place of it, including a command palette that opens with Command or Control plus K and can navigate anywhere on the site without a pointer.

Every page is server-rendered as real HTML with a proper heading order before any script runs, which matters for screen readers as much as it does for search engines: the document is complete and navigable if JavaScript never executes at all. Data tables are marked up as tables, and wide ones scroll inside their own container so that the page itself never scrolls sideways on a phone.

Known limits

Automated contrast measurement cannot see everything. It does not judge whether a colour distinction carries meaning that is unavailable to someone who cannot perceive it, it does not test screen reader announcement order, and it says nothing about whether the wording of a page is clear. Those need people, and this site has not been through a formal third-party audit. Charts are the weakest area: several convey information by colour with a text alternative that is available but not always adjacent.

If something here does not work with your assistive technology, that is a defect and worth reporting even if it seems minor. Get in touch via the contact page, or see the about page for who maintains the site.