CoRE-Math Africa–Europe Cluster of Research Excellence in Mathematics Africa–Europe Clusters of Research Excellence

Website audit — Round 1 implementation

Date: 13 October 2026

Reference: Website design and consistency audit Scope: technical reliability and accessibility maintenance only. No visual-design, typography, content or layout convention was redesigned.

1. Published image investigation

What was investigated

The audit had reported five unloaded Network & Partnerships images:

The local source files were checked for existence, filename spelling and case. The corresponding published URLs were checked for successful image responses. A delayed live-browser check then confirmed that each image decoded with a non-zero intrinsic width, including the Groningen external image.

Cause

The initial audit capture queried image dimensions before all remote and large local assets had completed decoding. It therefore produced false negatives; the files and published paths are valid. No image source, filename or content was changed.

Prevention added

scripts/check_local_assets.py now checks every repository reference to local /assets/images/ and /assets/documents/ files. It deliberately does not fetch external images, whose availability is outside the repository build boundary. The Check local assets GitHub Actions workflow runs the check on pull requests and pushes to main.

Remaining consideration

Several member portraits intentionally use third-party hosts. They were live during this check, but can change without a repository commit. The local check protects repository-managed assets; a future, separately approved link-monitoring task would be needed to monitor external providers.

2. Base stylesheet provenance

What was investigated

_layouts/default.html loads /assets/css/style.css, even though that file is not in the repository. The published response was inspected and identified as the Primer base stylesheet supplied by GitHub Pages.

Cause

GitHub Pages had selected Primer implicitly. The site therefore depended on an unrecorded default-theme decision for the baseline reset, Markdown styling and typography.

Change

_config.yml now declares:

theme: jekyll-theme-primer

This preserves the existing generated stylesheet and visual baseline while making the dependency explicit and reproducible by GitHub Pages.

3. Focused accessibility corrections

Keyboard focus

The site had bespoke focus styling for selected controls, but no source-owned, consistent focus indicator for ordinary links, buttons, summaries and form controls. assets/css/content.css now provides a 3px CoRE-Math-blue :focus-visible outline with offset. It appears only for keyboard focus and does not change normal visual presentation.

Homepage news thumbnails are linked independently from their adjacent headline. Their decorative images have empty alternative text, which left those links without an accessible name. index.md now supplies each thumbnail link with aria-label="Read [post title]"; the image remains decorative because the title link provides the visible article title.

The News & Events listing already removes its redundant image links from the tab order with aria-hidden="true" and tabindex="-1", while retaining the regular title link, so no change was required there.

Opportunities filters

The three selects already have visible labels. Filter changes now also update a visually hidden role="status" live region with the resulting opportunity count. The existing visible no-results message remains unchanged. This gives screen-reader users confirmation when dynamic filtering changes the list.

Dialogs, lightbox and mobile

The member-profile interface uses native labelled <dialog> elements, real buttons, backdrop interaction and focus restoration. The news lightbox uses a labelled native dialog, explicit controls, keyboard image navigation and focus restoration. No confirmed change was required to either interaction. At 390px the representative page families retain the mobile menu and a single-column flow without document-level horizontal overflow.

Content checks

Source review found alternative text on content images and intentional empty alternatives on purely decorative/redundant thumbnail images. Heading hierarchy and labelled form controls were checked across homepage, primary landings, Contact, representative programme/project/research-group/event pages, a news article/archive, institutional profiles, fellowship tables and Opportunities. No editorial text was rewritten for automated checking.

4. Dormant Research table of contents

The Research page contained an entire hidden local-navigation block. research.md and assets/css/research.css no longer include this unused markup or its associated styles. The visible layout, section anchors and main navigation are unchanged.

5. Verification

Files changed