Accessibility
Open Cosmos should be usable by as many people as possible, including people who use a keyboard, a screen reader, a phone, large text or high contrast, and people who read right to left.
What Open Cosmos supports
- Everything can be used with a keyboard. A skip link jumps to the main content, and the focus outline is always visible.
- Four colour modes: Galaxy (the default dark look), Light, High contrast and a colour-blind friendly palette. By default we follow your device settings for dark or light and for more contrast. Text and buttons are built to meet WCAG AA contrast.
- Text can be made 125% or 150% bigger, line and paragraph spacing can be made roomier, and an easy-to-read font (Atkinson Hyperlegible) can be switched on.
- Moving stars and effects can be switched off, and we follow your device's reduce-motion setting.
- Lessons, guide slides and entry descriptions have a Listen button that reads the page aloud with your browser's built-in voices, with pause, stop and speed controls. Nothing is sent over the network.
- Open Cosmos works in English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Portuguese, and Arabic pages are right to left.
- Pages use landmarks, a logical heading order, labelled buttons and form fields, and announcements for changes, so they work with screen readers such as VoiceOver, NVDA and TalkBack.
How to change the settings
Choose the Accessibility button at the top of any page. A panel opens with the choices. Press Escape to close it. Your choices are saved only in this browser (not on our servers) and apply on every page.
Known limits
- Read-aloud voices depend on your device and browser. Some devices have no voice for Arabic or Hindi, and the quality and speed of voices vary. If there is no voice we say so.
- Most Spanish, Arabic, Hindi and Portuguese texts were translated with the help of AI and have not been checked by native speakers yet, so some wording may be unnatural or wrong.
- We link to other websites. We cannot control how accessible they are.
- The coding problems run code in the browser. The code box is a plain text area that works with a keyboard and screen reader, but writing code with a screen reader can be hard.
- The easy-to-read font only changes Latin letters. Arabic and Hindi text keeps your device font.
- We aim to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA. We test with automated checks (axe-core), keyboard-only walk-throughs and manual checks, but we have not had an outside audit.
Report a problem
Grown-ups can switch on the grown-up view (the button at the bottom of any page) and then use "For grown-ups: report a problem or suggest a fix" to tell the team about a barrier. Please do not include personal information.
Turn on the grown-up view (button at the bottom of the page) to see the report form.