Accessibility

What no conformance claim means

This site does not claim WCAG conformance at any level, because it has not been audited against WCAG by anyone. Displaying a level badge without an audit is a claim, not a courtesy. What follows is a description of what was actually built and checked.

The reading controls

The Reading panel in the bottom-right corner is not decorative. Each control changes the document:

• Text size — four steps, scaling the root font size to 100%, 112%, 125% and 140%. Every layout on the site uses relative units and was checked at the largest step, at 320 pixels wide, for overflow and for content that falls out of its container.
• Higher contrast — deepens the ink, the muted text and the hairline rules, and removes the paper grain. It applies in both the light and the dark theme.
• Stop motion — genuinely stops things. The deposit-chit canvas draws one still frame and cancels its animation loop, scroll-driven reveals are disabled with everything left visible, the ticker halts, the signature is drawn complete, and smooth scrolling reverts to instant. It defaults to on if your operating system already asks for reduced motion, and it can be turned back on independently of that.
• Underline every link — for links outside prose, which are otherwise distinguished by weight and colour.

All four persist in localStorage and are applied before the page paints, so nothing flashes in the wrong state.

Reduced motion without touching the widget

If your operating system is set to reduce motion, the site honours prefers-reduced-motion directly. Nothing important is conveyed by movement alone: every reveal animation only changes opacity and position on content that is fully present in the markup, so a reader that ignores CSS animation sees the complete page.

Structure and keyboard

• A skip link is the first focusable element on every page.
• Landmarks are real elements: header, nav, main, footer, with labelled navigation regions.
• One h1 per page, and heading levels descend without skipping.
• The index menu, the ink panel and the reading panel are keyboard operable, trap focus while open, close on Escape, and return focus to the control that opened them. The theme control is a three-position radio group that responds to arrow keys.
• Focus is always visible: a two-and-a-half pixel outline in the current brand colour, offset from the element.
• Interactive targets are at least forty-four pixels in their smaller dimension.

Colour

Colour is never the only carrier of meaning. Chart series are distinguished by stroke pattern as well as hue, and every figure drawn in a chart is also printed as text beside it. The five ink sets were each checked against both the light and the dark ground before being offered; a palette that could not pass was not shipped rather than corrected at runtime.

Images

Every photograph carries descriptive alternative text that says what is in the picture. Where the fact that an image is stock photography matters rather than being incidental, the page says so in visible text instead of burying it in an alt attribute: the case folios are marked as stock photography rather than clients, and the note under the portrait on the about page says the broker’s likeness is a stock photograph of a model. Decorative elements — the chit field, the signature flourish, the ticker — are hidden from assistive technology.

Known gaps

• No independent audit, and no testing with real assistive-technology users.
• The amortisation table is long. It scrolls inside its own container with a sticky header row, which is better than a page that scrolls sideways, but a very long table is still hard work in any reader.
• The charts are drawn as SVG with a text summary in their accessible name. A full data table alternative for every chart would be better; the amortisation calculator has one, the others do not.
• The calculators require JavaScript. Without it the inputs render and the page reads, but no figures are produced.

Telling us

On a real site this section would give you a way to report a barrier and a commitment to respond. This is a demonstration with fictional contact details, so it cannot honestly offer either.