Accessibility Statement

Last updated: September 4, 2026

Before you publish this page: this states a commitment and an ongoing effort, not a completed conformance claim — that distinction matters. If you later need to give a university procurement office a formal VPAT/Accessibility Conformance Report (many now require one before licensing a vendor tool), that has to be based on an actual accessibility audit of the live app, not written from this page. Don’t let anyone fill one out claiming conformance that hasn’t been tested — a false VPAT is worse than none at all.

Outsette is built for students, and that means it needs to work for every student — including those who use a screen reader, navigate by keyboard alone, or rely on high-contrast display settings. This page describes our commitment, what we’ve done so far, and how to tell us when we’ve gotten something wrong.

Our target standard

We’re working toward conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA — the standard most commonly referenced by U.S. courts, the Department of Justice, and the universities we partner with. We treat this as an ongoing commitment, not a box we’ve checked once and finished: as we build new features, we build accessibility into them rather than bolting it on afterward, and we prioritize fixes as we learn about gaps.

What we do today

Semantic HTML and landmark structure, so screen readers and other assistive technology can navigate the page’s actual structure rather than a flat list of elements.
Visible keyboard focus states on interactive controls, and a site built to be operable without a mouse.
Descriptive link and button text, alt text for meaningful images, and form fields with associated labels.
A color palette chosen with contrast in mind, and no information conveyed by color alone.
Respect for your device’s reduced-motion preference where we use animation.

Known limitations

We’re not aware of every gap, and we haven’t yet completed a full, independent accessibility audit — so there are almost certainly places we fall short of full conformance today. A few things are also partly outside our control: news articles, job and internship postings, and course pages we link to are hosted by third parties, and their accessibility is theirs to fix, not ours. We link out rather than embedding that content directly specifically so a screen reader or other assistive technology can rely on the source site’s own accessibility rather than something we’ve wrapped around it.

Tell us when something doesn’t work

If you use assistive technology and hit a barrier anywhere on Outsette — a control you can’t reach by keyboard, an image without useful alt text, text that’s hard to read against its background — please tell us. Email accessibility@outsette.com with what page you were on and what happened; we read every report and aim to acknowledge it within 5 business days.

For university and procurement contacts

If your institution’s procurement process requires a formal Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT), contact accessibility@outsette.com — we’ll let you know the current state of that documentation rather than sending you something that overstates where we are.