What this site conforms to, and what it does not

This site aims at WCAG 2.2 level AA. Every claim below is enforced by a check that runs on every build and fails it if the claim stops holding, so this is a report rather than a statement of intent.

If something here is in your way, please tell us: a specific page and what happened is enough. Send it through the contact form (opens in a new tab) and it will be read.

What has been measured

Automated rules, two engines

axe-core with every rule enabled, including the nine that ship disabled and the ones tagged experimental, and HTML_CodeSniffer against WCAG2AA. Every page, both engines, zero violations.

Three browser engines, and where that stops

Thirteen of the twenty-nine checks run in more than one engine, on Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. One of the thirteen, the keyboard path, is skipped on WebKit, where Tab reaches only form fields unless the reader has turned that on. Five more need a browser and run on Chromium alone, saying so in their names: the declared icons, the focus indicator, the back/forward cache, Core Web Vitals and hero contrast. The remaining eleven need no browser at all. Nothing was relaxed to make any of them pass, and this paragraph is itself checked against the code on every build.

Contrast of text over photographs

Measured on the pixels of the letters themselves rather than on declared colours, because a heading over a photograph has no single background. Every heading and every line of hero text, at ten widths from 280px to 2560px, meets the 4.5:1 that body text requires or the 3:1 that large text requires.

Focus indicator, 1.4.11

Measured the same way, by comparing the pixels a focus ring changes against what is behind them, on both a light and a dark background. A single colour could not reach the required 3:1 on this palette, because the brown outline this site used before measured 1.66:1 against the orange button, so the indicator carries two tones.

Target size, 2.5.8

Every interactive target is at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, checked at 375px and 1280px. The photo credits in the footer are smaller because they are links inside a sentence, which the criterion exempts.

Text spacing, 1.4.12

Line height forced to 1.5, letter spacing to 0.12em, word spacing to 0.16em and paragraph spacing to 2em, all at once, on every page: nothing is clipped and nothing leaves the screen.

Reflow, 1.4.10

No horizontal scrolling at any width from 280px, in landscape, or at 320 by 256 CSS pixels, the shape of a 1280 by 1024 window at 400% zoom.

Keyboard, 2.4.11

Every page tabbed from start to finish: the skip link comes first, every stop is on screen when it receives focus, and the sticky header covers none of them.

Without JavaScript, and by touch

Every page is served complete and reads the same with scripting switched off: each of the eleven was loaded twice, once with JavaScript disabled, and the text was identical. What scripting adds is the ability to change things: stepping the specimen on the home page through its later states, and moving the sliders. Those states are a demonstration rather than content, and they are the one thing a reader without JavaScript does not get. The mobile menu is a checkbox and a label and opens with scripting off entirely. The menu was also exercised by tap rather than by cursor.

Motion and forced colours

prefers-reduced-motion is honoured, confirmed in the browser, not just written in the stylesheet. Nothing on the site opts out of Windows High Contrast with forced-color-adjust.

What still falls short

Listed because a statement that admits nothing is not worth reading.

No testing with a real screen reader

The accessibility tree, the reading order and every name and role have been checked programmatically, but nobody has yet listened to these pages through VoiceOver or NVDA. Automated checks cannot tell you whether a page makes sense out loud.

Level AAA is not the target

Three AAA rules are deliberately excluded. The one that matters is enhanced contrast, which asks for 7:1, unreachable for text over a photograph without a backdrop this design does not have. The other two are identical-links-same-purpose and meta-refresh-no-exceptions.

Two pages shift slightly while loading

On a slow connection the hero text on the home page and on the e-cash page can move once as the page finishes arriving. It stays well inside the 0.1 that counts as good, and the build fails if it stops doing so. The cause is that hero text sits at the bottom of its section, so anything arriving late pushes it up.

Tab does not reach links in Safari by default

This is macOS rather than this site: Safari only moves focus between form fields unless "Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage" is turned on in its settings. Nothing a page can change.

The print stylesheet is unverified on paper

It expands every FAQ answer, drops the navigation and prints link addresses, but has only been checked on screen.

Assessed by self-evaluation, using automated measurement across three browser engines. No third party has audited it.