Accessibility at FosterTRAIN

FosterTRAIN is built for the foster care workforce, and the people who use it include caregivers, trainers, agency staff, and Title IV-E administrators working with a wide range of abilities and devices. We want every person who needs training, records, or reporting to be able to get it without asking for help.

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA as our conformance target across the public site and the signed-in platform. Where we fall short of that target, this page states it plainly rather than claiming full conformance.

Every interactive element can be reached and operated without a mouse. Links and buttons are real links and buttons, so Tab and Shift+Tab move through the page in reading order and Space or Enter activates the focused control.

• Dialogs and the mobile menu trap focus while open and return focus to the control that opened them.
• Escape closes menus, dialogs, and the mobile navigation drawer.
• Focus is always visible, with a high-contrast outline on both light and dark surfaces.
• Skip navigation is available so a keyboard user can jump past the sidebar menu straight into page content.

Pages are built with semantic landmarks (banner, navigation, main, contentinfo), one descriptive `h1` per page, and heading levels that never skip. Form fields carry programmatic labels, and errors are announced in text rather than communicated by color alone.

Icons that carry meaning have accessible names, and purely decorative icons are hidden from assistive technology. Tables use real header cells, status changes are announced politely, and the cookie banner is exposed as a labeled region rather than a modal that steals focus.

We test with VoiceOver on Safari and iOS, NVDA on Windows, and TalkBack on Android. These combinations are checked whenever we change navigation, forms, or the intake flow.

• Body and interface text meets the 4.5:1 contrast minimum; large text and icons meet 3:1.
• Layout reflows to 320 CSS pixels without horizontal scrolling, and text can be zoomed to 200% without loss of content or function.
• Information is never conveyed by color alone; statuses carry a text label as well as a color.
• Interactive targets are at least 44 by 44 CSS pixels on touch screens.
• Animations are short and none flash; the platform respects the operating system's reduced-motion preference.

Registration, intake, and billing forms label every field, group related fields, and place error messages next to the field they belong to with an explicit statement of what to correct. Required fields are marked in text as well as visually.

Where a session has an inactivity limit for security, the app warns before it expires and keeps entered work intact so nothing has to be typed twice.

We would rather be honest than overstate. As of this statement, these areas are still being improved:

• Some generated PDF documents (certificates, invoices, audit packages) are readable by screen readers as text but do not yet carry fully tagged structure or alternate descriptions for embedded images.
• Some dense data tables scroll horizontally on small phones; their headers remain associated with the cells, but the scroll region is not as comfortable with a screen reader as a stacked card view.
• Third-party embedded content, such as payment fields rendered by our payment processor, is governed by that provider's own accessibility work.

Each item above is tracked, and we will update this page as they are resolved.

If something on FosterTRAIN is difficult or impossible to use with your assistive technology, tell us. Describe the page, the device or screen reader you are using, and what you expected to happen. We treat accessibility reports as defects, not feature requests.

• Reach us through the Contact Page and mention accessibility in your message.
• Signed-in users can open Support Gia or a support request directly from the platform.
• Response Time: we acknowledge accessibility reports within two business days and tell you what we plan to do.

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