Last reviewed August 6, 2026
Our commitment
scienium is built to be usable by everyone, including people who navigate with a keyboard, a screen reader, magnification, or reduced motion. We aim to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA — the standard referenced by the Americans with Disabilities Act, by Section 504, and by the U.S. Department of Justice's rule for state and local government entities, which includes public schools.
We are stating a target we work against and measure, not a certification. The honest gaps are listed below.
What we have tested
- Automated checks run against every public page — the home page, this page, the Privacy Policy, the Terms, and the sign-in and sign-up screens — at both desktop and phone widths, on every change. These pages currently report no critical or serious automated violations.
- Automated checks also run against the signed-in app, covering the lab, the Operations Hub, Discovery, and the Literature Review.
- Keyboard operation is tested as a real flow, not just scanned: reaching a building by <kbd>Tab</kbd>, opening it with <kbd>Enter</kbd>, moving inside the panel without focus escaping it, and closing with <kbd>Esc</kbd> with focus returned to where it started.
- A skip link is the first thing a keyboard user reaches on every page.
- Motion respects your system setting. If your device asks for reduced motion, the scroll effects, parallax, and celebratory animations are turned off rather than merely shortened.
- Layout holds at 320px wide and under magnification, without a horizontal scrollbar.
- The pixel-art typeface is used only for headings, labels, and chrome. Anything you have to actually read — articles, lessons, feedback, these legal documents — is set in a standard, resizable typeface.
Known limitations
We would rather name these than let you discover them:
- No full manual audit yet. Automated tools catch roughly a third of real accessibility problems. scienium has not yet had a complete manual review with screen readers across every screen, and we have not commissioned a third-party audit.
- The Battle Arena is a timed, real-time game. Raids run against a clock and communicate a lot through animation and color. It is the least accessible part of the product, and it is optional — no part of the research work, the lessons, or the science-fair pipeline depends on playing it.
- Embedded outside content is not ours to fix. Lessons can link to YouTube videos, publisher PDFs, and Wikipedia articles. We control how they are presented; we do not control their internal accessibility.
- We do not use an accessibility overlay or widget, and we will not. Those products do not fix the underlying code, and courts and the Federal Trade Commission have both rejected the claim that installing one makes a site compliant. We fix the markup instead.
Tell us what is broken
If any part of scienium blocks you, we want to hear about it directly — including if you are a teacher or parent reporting on a student's behalf.
Email hello@scienium.app and, if you can, tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and what assistive technology you use. We aim to reply within 30 days, and we will tell you either when the fix will ship or how to get the same thing done another way in the meantime.
If you need something from scienium urgently and an accessibility barrier is in the way, say so in the message and we will find you a manual workaround rather than making you wait for a release.
For schools and districts
If your district needs accessibility documentation for procurement, email the address above. scienium is operated by an individual, and we would rather answer your specific questions honestly than hand over a boilerplate conformance report.