Accessibility

What I am aiming for

I want this site to work for everyone who lands on it, including people using a screen reader, a keyboard instead of a mouse, magnification, or any other assistive technology.

The standard I aim at is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA. That is a target I build toward, not a badge. Nobody independent has audited this site, so I am not going to tell you it conforms to that standard or to any other. I can only tell you honestly what I have done.

What I have actually done

A skip-to-content link, so keyboard users can jump straight past the navigation to the main content of a page.

Semantic HTML landmarks, so a screen reader announces the header, the navigation, the main content and the footer as what they are, and you can move between them.

Visible focus outlines on links, buttons and controls, so you can see where you are when you tab through a page.

Alt text on images, written to describe what is actually in the picture.

The portfolio filter uses a live region, so when you change the filter and the list of work updates, a screen reader announces how many pieces are showing instead of leaving you guessing.

The video pop-up can be opened, operated and closed with the keyboard alone, including closing it with the Escape key, and it keeps keyboard focus inside itself while it is open.

I checked the text and background colours against the contrast ratios in WCAG rather than assuming they were fine.

There is no accessibility overlay or plug-in widget on this site. Those do not fix underlying problems, and I would rather do the work in the pages themselves.

Where it falls short

The videos on this site do not have captions or transcripts yet. That is the clearest gap, I know it is a real barrier if you are deaf or hard of hearing, and it is the thing I most want to fix.

I built this site myself and I have not had it tested by an accessibility professional or by people who use assistive technology every day, so there are almost certainly things I have missed. I have also not tested every page against every combination of browser, operating system and screen reader.

If something on this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, that is a gap on my side, not on yours.

If something does not work for you

Please email me at themamafinds@gmail.com and tell me what you were trying to do, what got in the way, and what you were using at the time, for example the browser and any assistive technology. Even a rough description helps.

I will get back to you, and I will fix what I can. If a fix is going to take me a while, I will say so, and I will try to get you the information or the content another way in the meantime. I would much rather hear about a problem than have it sit there unreported.

A note on this page

I wrote this myself, describing what I actually did rather than what I would like to be able to say. It makes no claim to conformance, and the date at the top is when I last checked it against the site.