Access for all
A resource that never arrives does not exist
Publishing is only half the job. Between a person and what they are trying to learn sits a route: a network, a device, a language, sometimes a checkpoint. That route is our work as much as the content is.
Our access commitment
Anyone must be able to open our resources, read them, copy them and pass them on: with no account, no payment, no permission, and without having to say who they are.
Organisation pour le Développement de l’Éducation, des Ressources et des Savoirs AccessiblesNonprofit association under French law · Paris
Who this is written for
A pupil revising on a parent’s phone, on a data plan counted by the megabyte. An adult learning to use an online service who owns no computer. A library worker who is not allowed to install software on the public machines. Someone living where network access is filtered, watched, unreliable or expensive, and for whom opening a page is never a small thing.
None of this is unusual, and it all comes back to the same point: the content is not what is missing, the way to reach it is. A site that demands an account, weighs a great deal and calls out to outside servers is shut to every one of those people, however good what it holds may be.
The state of a network is not ours to change. What our pages demand before they open is.
The route
Where access is won, or lost
At the door
Nothing to get past
No account to create, no app to install, no subscription, no banner to accept before reading. You open the address and the page is there, whole. There is no cut-down version, no reserved content, no button that would unlock the rest.
Pages stay readable when the browser runs no scripts at all: text, lists, tables and links are served as plain markup in the document, and the navigation unfolds instead of vanishing.
What this does not promiseTwo controls do need a script to work: the filters on the action map, and the site search. In both cases the same information is still served without one, the full list of actions below the map and the site map below the search field.
On the wire
Light enough for a bad line
A page on this site calls no outside library, no video, no advertising, no analytics. It carries its text, its stylesheet and its fonts, all served from the same place it is, and its weight is counted in kilobytes rather than megabytes.
That is what makes it openable on a slow line, on an old handset, or on a data allowance somebody is keeping an eye on. Lightness here is not a figure to show off: it is the condition for the page to arrive at all.
What this does not promiseWe answer for what we send, not for what happens between our pages and you. Network quality, the price of data, the age of a device: none of that is in our hands.
Off the wire
Read once, readable after
Every one of the association’s sites keeps its pages in the browser as you go. Cut the connection: what you opened opens again. Where the network comes and goes, the resource does not go with it, and a session prepared in the morning still runs in the afternoon with no line at all.
That cache lives on your device and sends us nothing. It clears from your browser’s own settings, like any other.
What this does not promiseYou have to have been there once. A device that has never reached the site has nothing to fall back on: that is where a copy, a memory stick and a sheet of paper take over.
In the language
Language is not a toll
Our resources are published in several languages, up to seven depending on the resource: French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese. Arabic reads right to left, and the pages turn around with it rather than bending it into a layout designed for the Latin alphabet.
How many languages a resource carries follows from what it teaches and who it serves. It never follows from the country a request comes from: nobody is pushed towards a lesser version because of where they happen to be.
What this does not promiseNot every resource carries all seven languages: each site declares, in its language switcher and in its markup, the ones it genuinely holds. On a first visit your browser’s language setting may offer you the other version; one click on the switcher overrides that for good, and nothing at all is decided on the country a request comes from.
By your own route
A careful visitor is not a suspect
Our pages set no condition of entry: no sign-in, no test to clear before reading, no special handling depending on the route a request took. People arriving through a privacy network therefore arrive here like everyone else.
Onion routing is switched on at our host: traffic coming from that network reaches our pages without having to leave it. It is an infrastructure setting, invisible to anyone who does not use it, and it changes nothing for other visitors.
What this does not promiseWe supply no circumvention tool, we promise none, and we advise nobody on that ground. Our part comes down to two things: block nothing, expose nothing. The tooling belongs to the visitor, who knows it better than we do.
And without us
A copy is worth the original
Everything we publish carries a CC BY 4.0 license, and the data behind our figures is open. Printing a page and photocopying it for a class, translating it, carrying it on a memory stick, putting it back online elsewhere under a different domain name: all of that is allowed, all of it is intended, and none of it needs asking. The one condition is to credit the source.
It is the sturdiest access guarantee we know how to give, because it no longer depends on us. On a day when our servers do not answer, or cannot be reached, what has been copied goes on working.
What we do not promise
We publish, and we raise no barrier. We do not claim to bring anyone else’s down.
An association promising to get people past controls would endanger the very people it means to serve, and would step outside its own purpose. What we hold to is smaller, and it can be checked: nothing on our side blocks, and nothing on our side exposes.
Where each of these sentences can be checked
None of the above asks to be taken on trust. The association’s commitments, and the way each one is checked, are set out on the Our approach page. The absence of any collection can be demonstrated in a minute, network inspector open, on the Privacy page. What is in place and what is still missing is written down in the accessibility statement. Response times measured from several continents, and the raw file they come from, are published on the technical proof page. The exact terms of reuse fit on the license page.
If something blocks, we want to hear about it
A page that refuses to open, a file too heavy for the connection you have, a missing language, a control you cannot reach from the keyboard: write to us. We do not measure our visitors, so we learn nothing on our own. An obstacle nobody tells us about stays exactly where it is.