1. The commitment

Someone looking for legal help should not be stopped by the website in front of them. This site is built to be usable without a mouse, without perfect eyesight and without a large screen, and accessibility is treated as part of building it rather than as a check at the end.

That is a commitment to a way of working, not a claim of perfection. The section on known limitations below is part of the same commitment.

2. What has been done

  • Keyboard operation. Every control is a real button or link, so it can be reached with Tab and operated with Enter or Space. Nothing is clickable only by mouse.
  • Visible focus. Whatever has keyboard focus is outlined clearly, with the outline set off from the element so it stays readable against the background.
  • A skip link. The first thing in the tab order jumps past the header straight to the content.
  • The question tabs. The groups of questions are a proper tab set: arrow keys move between groups, Home and End jump to the first and last, and each panel is announced as belonging to its tab.
  • All answers stay in the page. Switching groups hides and shows panels rather than rebuilding them, so a browser's find-in-page reaches every answer and all of them print.
  • Text contrast. Text tones are measured against the backgrounds they sit on rather than picked by eye. Body text is at least 7:1 against the page, and the lighter tone used for secondary notes is at least 4.5:1. Two accent uses sit below the threshold and are listed under known limitations rather than glossed over.
  • Text that scales. The layout reflows and headings track the size of the window, so enlarging the page in the browser does not cut content off or force sideways scrolling.
  • Reduced motion. If your system asks for less motion, transitions and smooth scrolling are switched off.
  • Real form labels. Every field in the enquiry form has a visible label tied to it, so the field is announced correctly and the label stays on screen once you start typing. Placeholders are hints, never the only label.
  • Meaningful alternatives. Photographs that carry information have text alternatives; purely decorative images are marked so that assistive technology skips them instead of reading a filename.
  • Structure. Headings run in order, the page has one main landmark, and the navigation, the content and the footer are marked as such.

3. Known limitations

Being straightforward about what is not yet done is more useful than a blanket claim:

  • The site has not yet been through a full audit with a screen reader, so no conformance level is claimed on this page. That audit is planned before launch and this statement will be updated with its result.
  • Two typefaces are loaded from a third-party service. If they fail to load, the page falls back to system fonts, which changes the look but not the readability.
  • Photographs used as card backgrounds are darkened so that white text sits on them at a comfortable contrast, but a background image is still a background image: if you use a high-contrast or forced-colours mode, those cards may render differently from the rest.
  • Two accent colours do not meet the contrast thresholds: the emphasised line of each heading, and the highlight behind a navigation item while the pointer is over it. The wording of every heading is repeated in the rest of the page, and no navigation label depends on that highlight to be read, but neither is at the level the rest of the text holds.
  • Body text is set in pixels. Zooming the page works normally, but a browser configured with a larger default text size will not enlarge this text on its own.
  • The enquiry form sends from the page itself. If a message cannot be sent, the page says so plainly instead of pretending otherwise, and gives the address to write to directly.

4. If something does not work for you

Please tell me, and please be specific: what you were trying to do, what happened instead, which page you were on, and what you were using, for example a screen reader and its version, or keyboard only, or a particular browser at a particular zoom level. That detail is what makes a problem fixable.

Write to info@caseyjohnslaw.com. A report about accessibility is treated as a fault report, not as a request for a favour.

5. Getting in touch another way

If the form on this site is not usable for you, the published email address reaches the same place and is a complete alternative to it. No enquiry has to go through the form.

If a different arrangement would make a matter easier to discuss, for example correspondence in a particular format, say so in your first message and it will be accommodated where it can be.

6. Standards this statement works towards

The site is built against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and the intention is to meet level AA. Until the audit in section 3 has been carried out, that is stated as an intention rather than as an achieved level, because a conformance claim should rest on testing and not on good intentions.

7. Review

This statement is reviewed whenever the site changes in a way that affects how it is used, and in any event when the audit described above is completed. The version and the date of the last change are shown beside the title.

Questions about this document

Write to info@caseyjohnslaw.com.