Accessibility and disability accommodations
Table of contents
The Canada Industrial Relations Board (the Board) is committed to ensuring that its hearing rooms and offices are accessible to persons with disabilities.
For more information on accessibility, please consult the Accessible Canada Act and the Accessible Canada Regulations.
Types of accommodation at the Board
The types of accommodation that can be provided depend on an individual’s disability and the availability of different types of equipment and services. That is why it is important for the Board to know of any request in advance, because this will allow it to take the appropriate action.
This may include:
- assistive listening devices or sound amplification systems;
- sign language interpretation or real-time captioning;
- support for people who have difficulty speaking, listening or seeing due to a disability; and
- scheduling meetings and court proceedings in hearing rooms that can accommodate disabilities—this also applies to the use of virtual technologies.
Accessibility features at Board locations may include:
- walkways, elevators and ramps;
- barrier-free entrances and exits; and
- accessible information desks, counters, mediation rooms and hearing rooms.
Inquiries
Any inquiries on accessibility can be addressed directly to the Board via an online inquiry or by speaking to the Industrial Relations Officer assigned to your file.
Requests for accommodation must be presented to the Board as soon as possible in order for it to take the appropriate action.
Useful definitions
Barrier means anything—including anything physical, architectural, technological or attitudinal, anything that is based on information or communications or anything that is the result of a policy or a practice—that hinders the full and equal participation in society of persons with an impairment, including a physical, mental, intellectual, cognitive, learning, communication or sensory impairment or a functional limitation.
Disability means any impairment, including a physical, mental, intellectual, cognitive, learning, communication or sensory impairment—or a functional limitation—whether permanent, temporary or episodic in nature, or evident or not, that, in interaction with a barrier, hinders a person’s full and equal participation in society.
Web Accessibility statement
The Canada Industrial Relations Board (the Board) aims to meet the highest standards of accessibility. We follow the Government of Canada’s Standard on Web Accessibility. This standard follows the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, AA level.
This section highlights our efforts to improve accessibility. The Board knows it is important to have an inclusive website that is accessible to everyone.
Standards compliance
- All pages on this site meet WCAG 2.0 or higher.
- All pages on this site use structured semantic mark-up. H1 tags for the content area of the page, H2 tags for main titles, and H3 tags for subtitles are used.
Structural mark-up
Web pages include three different areas when Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) are not applied to a document. These areas are also used when using a screen reader.
- A header bar
- A main content area
- A footer
ARIA Landmarks
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite. It defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities.
This website makes use of ARIA mark-up that makes it easier to identify the major sections and roles on each page. A screen reader will choose major landmarks on the page such as:
- the content area,
- navigation mechanisms, and
- the search area.
The ARIA landmarks used include:
- Search
- Navigation
- Main
- Content info
Images
- All images on this web site have alternative text descriptions.
- Our content is usable or accessible without images.
Links
The Board does its best to have links written so that they make sense out of context. If this is not possible, a title attribute or other type of search aid to create context is added.
Forms
- All form controls are appropriately and clearly labelled.
- Users do not need JavaScript to be able to benefit from form validation.
Scripts
- Content of this web site is usable without JavaScript.
Visual design
This site uses only relative font sizes. These are compatible with the user-chosen "text size" option in visual browsers.
If your browser does not support custom CSS at all, the content of each page is still readable.
Any information conveyed with colour is also available without colour (i.e. text based).
This site does not have a “resize” widget. However, all the tools and functions provided by a widget like this is already built into all major browsers. Here are key options :
- Press Ctrl & + to increase the page size.
- Press Ctrl & - to decrease the page size.
- Press Ctrl & 0 (zero) to reset the page size to the web page's default size.
Links to external websites
Links to websites not under the control of the Board are provided solely for the convenience of users. The Board is not responsible for the accuracy, currency or reliability of the content of those sites. The Board does not offer any guarantee in that regard and is not responsible for the information found through these links, nor does it endorse the sites and their content.
Users should also be aware that information offered by non-Government of Canada sites to which the Board links is not subject to the Privacy Act or the Official Languages Act and may not be accessible to persons with disabilities. The information offered may be available only in the language(s) used by the sites in question, and visitors should research the privacy policies of the sites before providing personal information.
Accessibility tools
- NVDA a free, open-source screen reader (Windows)
- System Access (Windows)
- JAWS (Windows)
- VoiceOver (Mac)
- Orca (Linux)