Accessibility
What nOS conforms to, how it is tested, and how to report a barrier.
nOS should be usable by everyone, on any device, with a keyboard, a screen reader or a touchscreen. We target WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and today nOS partially conforms: most of it meets the standard and a few things, listed below, do not yet.
Applies to the nOS platform and usenos.org·Last reviewed October 2026Our commitment
A master schedule is administrative infrastructure. The person building it may be doing so with a screen reader, at 200% zoom, on a phone in a corridor, or with a trackpad that is hard to use precisely. None of that should make the job harder than it already is.
We treat accessibility as part of the interface rather than a remediation exercise, and we verify it on every surface rather than assuming it.
Devices and reflow
Every surface of the platform (Home, Course Requests, the Schedule Builder, Results, Schedule Studio and the Board, All schedules, the nOS AI panel and every dialog) reflows cleanly at phone, tablet and desktop widths, in both light and dark themes.
No surface requires horizontal page scrolling. Wide data tables scroll inside their own container with a visible edge affordance, and menus and dialogs become bottom sheets on phones so nothing clips at the screen edge.
Keyboard
All interactive controls are reachable and operable with a keyboard alone. A Skip to content link is the first focusable element on every page and moves focus past the navigation to the page's main landmark.
Focus is always visible. A single high-contrast focus ring is drawn using a box-shadow rather than an outline, so it remains visible on controls inside clipped or transformed containers, and it is drawn inset where it would otherwise fall under a gradient.
Screen readers and semantics
Each page exposes one main landmark and a single level-one heading. Icon-only buttons carry text labels. Tab bars use the tablist, tab and aria-selected pattern. Dialogs use the dialog role with aria-modal. The nOS AI conversation and live status readouts use polite live regions so updates are announced without interrupting. Decorative graphics are hidden from assistive technology.
Touch targets
Interactive controls meet a 44 by 44 pixel minimum touch target, per WCAG 2.5.5. Where a control is deliberately small for visual reasons, such as the guided-mode progress dots, it keeps its minimal appearance but carries an enlarged invisible hit area.
Reduced motion
When the operating system requests reduced motion, all non-essential animation is removed and transitions collapse to near-instant. End states are preserved, so nothing disappears or becomes unreachable as a result. This site follows the same rule: its only motion is a short fade-in on scroll, and that is disabled entirely under a reduced-motion preference.
Contrast and colour
Text and essential interface elements meet the AA contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for body text in both themes. Status is never conveyed by colour alone: fulfillment, "helped or harmed" indicators, and alert states all pair colour with text or iconography.
A forced-colors path preserves borders, focus rings and status meaning when Windows High Contrast mode overrides our palette.
Zoom
The viewport allows pinch-zoom and reflows to 200% without loss of content or function. We never disable user scaling.
How we verify
Automated. An axe-core pass for WCAG 2 A and AA rules runs against the screens of the platform at desktop and phone widths, in both themes, before a user-interface release, and a smaller pass over the shared building blocks runs on every release. Automated tools find only part of the problems, so they do not by themselves show conformance.
By hand. We tab through screens with the keyboard and check visible focus, headings and landmarks, touch targets, reduced motion and contrast in light and dark themes. We have not yet had an independent audit, and we have not yet tested systematically with JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver or TalkBack. We will say so here when that changes.
Known issues
A conformance claim is only meaningful alongside its exceptions, so here are ours. All are tracked.
- The sign-in and invite screens are maintained separately from the main application, and their page-title and language settings are still being checked.
- The guided-mode progress indicator produces a small number of role warnings in automated scans. It remains operable.
- Dragging to resize the nOS AI sidebar works only with a pointer. Keyboard users can resize it with the arrow keys, and every function of the panel works at its default width.
- The student course-request form has had less testing with assistive technology than the staff screens, and we are adding it to our automated checks.
- The demonstration film on this website has no captions, text transcript or audio description. Everything it shows is described in text on the product page.
Conformance status
nOS partially conforms with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. If your procurement process needs a formal conformance report (a VPAT) or a third-party audit, tell us and we will work through what you need and where we stand.
Reporting a barrier
If any part of nOS or this website is difficult or impossible for you to use, we want to hear about it. We treat these reports as bugs, not feedback.
Email bennettmiller@nosplanner.com, use the contact page, or choose Contact support inside the app. Please tell us the page or screen, what you were trying to do, and the assistive technology, browser and operating system you were using.
We will reply within two business days, and tell you what we plan to do about it.