Accessibility statement

Polestar strives to ensure digital accessibility for everyone.

We invest considerable efforts and use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA as a guide to ensure that persons with disabilities will be able to use and enjoy this website in an independent and equal manner.

We realise though that all areas of our websites are not yet fully accessible, but we are improving our websites’ accessibility features.

This Accessibility Statement provides our current Accessibility status, and we will update this Statement as our compliance efforts continue.

What we have done

We regularly audit our website to find issues and improve its accessibility. We have worked with an external auditor and focused on solving the most critical issues first. We strive to follow the guidelines of WCAG 2.1, which are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, in everything we do, and our ambition is to, as fully as possible, comply with the WCAG 2.1 level AA.

Some of our recent accessibility improvements are:

Technical possibility to have alternative texts for images

Updates in the Heading structure so that the headers are clearly and correctly marked.
Clear indications of the visible focus on the website
Improvements in the tab order
The possibility to pause auto-play videos
Technical possibility to have Aria labels on controls
Error messages in form pages
Landmarks in, for example, the footer

How we are working with accessibility

Our goal is to have a website that is accessible to everyone. To achieve this, we run continuous testing in the course of the development and perform manual audits several times per year. For automated testing, we use HTML validators, browser, and editor plugins.

We support the two latest major versions of the browsers Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Chrome.

Despite this, we are aware that we may, at any given time, not pass all available online validation tools. Please find below our strategy for how we aim to improve our customer experience, but also a list of all currently known issues that remain for us to address. We expect these issues to be resolved in future updates of the website redesigns, as they are part of our development backlog.

How we continuously improve

We continuously identify and document any accessibility issues that we find on our website and prioritise them according to the overall impact they have for our visitors, but also based on the level of effort that is required to address them. Issues that greatly affect the website experience from an accessibility perspective are immediately addressed. We take reasonable measures to fix other issues within 6 months from the time of our last audit.

If you encounter any accessibility issues while navigating our digital properties, please contact Polestar support at accessibility@polestar.cn.

Be assured that we take your feedback seriously and will consider it as we evaluate ways to accommodate all of our customers.

For information about our processing of your personal data, please read our Privacy notice.

Our goal is to comply with the WCAG 2.1 level AA to the greatest extent possible. Below we have documented the guidelines that still are work in progress.

Guideline 1.1 Text Alternatives
1.1.1 Non-text Content

Alternative texts are not provided on all pages.
Alterative texts are mostly provided in English and not local language.

Guideline 1.2 Time-based Media

Subtitles / alternative texts are missing on certain videos.
Certain videos lack the information that they are a decorative video.

Guideline 1.3 Adaptable
1.3.1 Info and Relationships

Some pages do not have a clear heading structure.
Some unnecessary use of aria.

1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence

This is applied to most pages but there are some few exceptions.

1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose

We don’t provide autocomplete information about auto-filled input fields.

Guideline 1.4 Distinguishable

1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum)

Some visual presentation of text and images of text does not have a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.

1.4.5: Images of Text

Some images of text are being used on some pages

1.4.11 Non-text Contrast

Some elements do not have the color contrast of 3:1 against adjacent colors.

Guideline 2.1 Keyboard Accessible

2.1.1 Keyboard

The internal links of the Cookie consent is not accessible via keyboard (3rd party component)
CAPTCHA is present in the form for creating a Polestar ID (3rd party vendor) but an alternative to contact Polestar support is given to the user.
There are some modal pages throughout the website that do not have a keyboard trap. It allows users to interact with elements that are outside of the modal.

Guideline 2.2 Enough Time

2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide

Some videos that are auto-play and looping, do not provide controls to play or pause.

Guideline 2.4 Navigable

2.4.1 Bypass Blocks

We don't have a mechanism is available to bypass blocks of content that are repeated on multiple Web pages.

2.4.3 Focus Order

Some pages need improvement in this area.

2.4.4 Link Purpose (In Context)

The purpose of some links can’t be determined from the link text alone or from the link text together with its programmatically determined link context.

Guideline 2.5 Input Modalities

2.5.3 Label in Name

Alt texts are missing in some cases.

Guideline 3.3 Input Assistance

3.2.3: Consistent Navigation

Navigation drawer changes links cross different sub domains.

3.3.1 Error Identification

Improvements are needed in the error notification for users after form submission.

Guideline 5. Conformance

5.2.5 Non-Interference

The internal links of the Cookie consent is not accessible via keyboard (3rd party component)