Accessibility
This site should work for everyone who needs it.
An organization about access has a particular obligation not to build something inaccessible. These are the measures currently in place, and how to tell us when we have got something wrong.
We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA. That is a target we hold ourselves to rather than a certification we have been awarded, and the list below describes what is actually implemented today.
Structure
- Semantic landmarks on every page, with a single meaningful level-one heading and a logical heading order beneath it.
- A skip link as the first focusable element on every page.
- Lists, tables and definition lists used for content that is genuinely a list, a table or a set of terms.
Keyboard and focus
- Every control — navigation, links, form fields and the mobile menu — is operable by keyboard alone.
- A visible focus indicator on both the light and dark grounds, never removed.
- The mobile menu traps focus while open, closes on Escape, returns focus to the button that opened it, and locks background scrolling.
Forms
- Every field has a real label, and required fields are marked in text as well as with a symbol.
- Validation errors are associated with their field programmatically and described in words, not by colour alone.
- Submission outcomes are announced to assistive technology and receive focus, so a screen-reader user is told what happened.
Colour and contrast
- Body and interface text meets or exceeds WCAG 2.1 AA contrast on both the parchment and navy grounds.
- No information is conveyed by colour alone — statuses, targets and pending states are all labelled in text.
Images
- Every photograph that carries meaning has descriptive alternative text; purely decorative images are hidden from assistive technology.
- Images are given fixed dimensions so the page does not shift as they load.
Motion
- All page content is present and readable before any animation runs — if scripts fail or are disabled, nothing is hidden.
- Animation respects the operating system’s reduced-motion setting and is switched off entirely when it is on.
- There is no scroll hijacking, no parallax that follows the cursor, and no motion that delays access to content.
Responsive and touch
- Layouts are designed for small screens rather than compressed into them, and no page scrolls horizontally.
- Interactive controls meet a practical minimum touch target size.
- Text scales with the browser’s own text size settings.
Tell us what isn’t working
If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, please tell us what you were trying to do and what got in the way. We will fix it, and we would rather hear about it than not.