Accessibility

How this site is built

1. Plain HTML with a real heading structure, landmarks and a skip link on every page.
2. Everything works with the keyboard. The focus indicator is loud on purpose.
3. The site runs no JavaScript at all. Navigation, the mobile menu and the contact form are HTML and CSS, so there is nothing to block, fail or wait for.
4. Text reflows to narrow screens and to zoom without a horizontal scrollbar, and no text is locked to a fixed pixel size.
5. Decorative artwork is marked as decorative, so a screen reader skips it instead of reading out a background.
6. Motion is minimal, and what there is respects the reduced-motion setting in your operating system.
7. Non-English text is tagged with its language so a screen reader pronounces it correctly, and conversational turns are in conversational order in the markup whichever side of the exchange they are drawn on.

Colour and contrast

Every foreground and background pair on this site comes from the My Words design system, where the ratios are documented. Body text meets WCAG AA at 4.5:1 or better against the surface it sits on, and the rails and markers that carry meaning meet 3:1 or better. The check that enforces this runs before the site is deployed.

Colour never carries speaker, status or risk on its own. Every turn names its speaker and its language in text, and every marker has a label.

What has been checked

The site has been checked for keyboard operation, heading order, colour contrast of text against its background, and behaviour at high zoom, at 320px, 390px, 768px, 1024px and 1440px.

What has not been checked

It has not yet been through a formal audit against WCAG 2.2 AA by an independent tester, and it has not been tested end to end with every combination of screen reader and browser. Until that has happened, we are not claiming a conformance level. When it has, this page will say what the result was, including anything that failed.

Known gaps

1. The home page headline sits over photographic artwork. The artwork is darkened behind the text so the ratio holds, but it is a photograph and not a flat panel, and we would rather say so.
2. The web font shipped with this site covers Latin and Latin Extended. Text in another script would fall back to a system font until the matching Noto subset is added.
3. The contact form is not wired to anything yet. Submitting it returns a page telling you the message was not sent and giving the email address, which does work.

Reporting a barrier

If something here stopped you, please tell us: [email protected]. It helps to know what you were using, so browser, assistive technology, and what you were trying to do. We treat these as bugs, not feedback, and a report about a barrier gets answered before most other post.

This statement describes mywords.chat, not the My Words application itself, which is assessed separately as part of the project's development.