Accessibility

Our target

We aim for WCAG 2.1 Level AA across the parts of Notera that are conventional interface: the marketing site, sign-in, dashboard, settings, billing, dialogs, and menus. We treat a failure in those areas as a bug, and you can report one the same way you would report any other.

We do not currently claim conformance for the canvas, for the reasons in the next section.

What works today

• Keyboard navigation through the dashboard, settings, and all dialogs and menus.
• Focus is trapped inside modals and returned to the trigger when they close.
• Dialogs, menus, and form controls carry accessible names and roles.
• Colour contrast meets WCAG 2.1 AA in the interface outside the canvas, in light and dark themes.
• The interface responds to your system light/dark preference.
• Text resizes with browser zoom without loss of function in the standard interface.
• Board and card content is real text, not images of text, so it can be selected and read aloud.
• Images support alternative text, which you can set on any image card.

Known gaps

These are real and we are not going to soften them:

• Canvas position is not conveyed to screen readers. A Notera board is a spatial arrangement, and meaning often lives in where things sit relative to each other. A screen reader receives the cards but not that spatial relationship.
• Drag-and-drop on the canvas is not keyboard-operable. Moving, resizing, and connecting cards currently require a pointing device.
• Drawing and freehand tools require a pointer and have no keyboard or assistive-technology equivalent.
• Presentation mode is driven by canvas navigation and inherits the same limitations.
• Canvas keyboard shortcuts are not fully documented in an accessible format, and are disabled entirely on public read-only views.
• No formal audit. We have not commissioned a third-party accessibility audit or published a VPAT. This statement is based on our own testing.

Why the canvas is hard

An infinite spatial canvas and a linear screen-reader model are genuinely in tension. A screen reader presents content as an ordered sequence; a canvas deliberately has no single correct order. Tools in this category, such as whiteboards, mood boards, and diagramming apps, all face this, and none has fully solved it.

That is an explanation, not an excuse. It shapes what we prioritise: making everything that surrounds the canvas genuinely accessible, making canvas content readable even when canvas manipulation is not, and closing the gaps that are solvable rather than treating the whole surface as out of reach.

What we are working on

• Keyboard-operable card movement and resizing, as an alternative to dragging.
• A linear, screen-reader-oriented list view of a board's contents.
• Documented, discoverable canvas keyboard shortcuts.
• Improved focus indicators on canvas elements.

We are a very small team, so we are not going to give dates we cannot keep. What we will commit to is that accessibility reports get triaged like any other bug, and that this page gets updated when the facts change rather than left to drift.

If Notera does not work for you

If the canvas is not usable with your assistive technology, we would rather help you than have you stuck:

• You can export all of your data as structured JSON at any time from Settings → Security → Your data, so nothing you put into Notera is trapped here.
• If you are on a paid plan and Notera turns out to be unusable for you because of an accessibility barrier, email us and we will refund you. We would rather do that than take money for something you cannot use.
• If you need something specific to get your work done, tell us. A concrete request from a real user is worth more to us than a generic checklist.

Reporting a problem

Email support@notera.sowith "Accessibility" in the subject line. It helps if you can tell us what you were trying to do, what happened, and what assistive technology, browser, and operating system you were using, but please do not let missing any of that stop you from writing.

We aim to respond within five business days.

Standards and scope

This statement covers notera.so and the Notera mobile applications. It is written with reference to WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the European Accessibility Act. We prepared it ourselves on the basis of internal testing; it has not been externally validated.

See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.