Accessibility
Accessibility Statement
This portal targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA, and it is tested rather than asserted. Where it falls short, this page says so.
Accessibility Approach
The people most likely to be hurt by a flood warning that cannot be read are the people already least likely to get one. In February 2017 the neighborhoods that flooded on Coyote Creek were largely low income, largely Spanish and Vietnamese speaking, and largely reached by nothing at all. An accessibility statement on a flood portal is not a compliance artifact. It is part of whether the warning arrives.
What Was Tested, and How
- Automated scanning with axe-core against the WCAG 2.0 A, 2.0 AA and 2.2 AA rule sets, run over a sample of every page template in this build at desktop and mobile viewports. The current result is zero violations.
- Keyboard-only operation of the masthead search, the primary navigation, the alert preferences, and the storm replay, including visible focus on every interactive control.
- Colour contrast checked programmatically rather than by eye. Body text on the page background holds 14.9 to 1. The quietest metadata still holds 4.8 to 1. The focus ring clears 3 to 1 in both the light and the dark register, which is what WCAG 2.2 added it for.
- Status colour never carries meaning alone. A gauge above a flood threshold is coloured, labelled in words, and described in its accessible name.
- Every interactive control is at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, and the primary ones are at least 44.
- The whole site is readable with JavaScript off. Readings, thresholds, tables and the storm record are all rendered on the server; script adds filtering, autocomplete and the replay clock, and takes nothing away.
Known Limits
- English only. Santa Clara County is genuinely multilingual and this build ships in one language. Machine translating flood safety instructions would be worse than not offering them, so the proposal names professional Spanish and Vietnamese translation with subject matter review as scope rather than faking it here.
- The storm replay is a moving graphic. It can be paused, it can be scrubbed one step at a time from the keyboard, it respects a reduced motion preference, and everything it shows is also in a static table below it. The animation is never the only copy of a fact.
- Automated testing is a floor, not a ceiling. Roughly a third of accessibility failures are the kind a scanner can catch. This statement will be worth more after assistive technology testing with real users, which the proposal budgets for.
The Portal This Replaces
The same automated scan was run against the current public portal in July 2026, and it returned five distinct categories of WCAG failure: form fields without labels, images without text alternatives, insufficient contrast, a progress indicator with no accessible name, and links with no discernible text. The site also opens behind a disclaimer dialog, so the first thing a resident does in an emergency is dismiss an interstitial.
Those findings are reported here because they are the baseline this work is measured against, and because a vendor that will not write them down is not going to fix them.
Tell Us What Broke
If any part of this site is unusable with your assistive technology, that is a defect and it gets triaged like one. On the live portal this section carries Valley Water's own accessibility contact and the district's response commitment. This is a working copy on stoa.works and it has no ticket queue behind it.
This statement describes the build rendered July 28, 2026 at 4:53 PM PT, covering 327 routes.