Two kinds of access, and honest notes on each

Using this site

Plain HTML, one stylesheet, two small scripts. That is a choice, and it is why most of what follows is true without much effort.

• Keyboard alone reaches everything, and focus is visible at all times as an outline in the prairie green.
• Press Tab once on arrival and the masthead is behind you, with the reading in focus.
• No heading level is skipped anywhere, which means the outline announced aloud is the outline printed on the page.
• Every photograph carries alternative text that describes the frame rather than listing keywords.
• The letter form uses real labels bound to real fields. A failed check prints its explanation beside the field, in words, not as a colour alone.
• The look up is a combobox with proper roles: arrow keys move through suggestions, Enter takes one, Escape closes the list, and the highlighted row is announced.
• Nothing animates on its own, nothing covers the page, and there is no carousel, modal or video anywhere.
• Body text is 17 pixels at a line height of 1.67 and takes a 200 per cent zoom without overlapping.
• Contrast was checked against WCAG 2.2 level AA. Rust on paper and ink on paper both clear it, and the green is used for focus and marks rather than for text.
• A request for reduced motion turns off the small fade entirely.

What is still awkward here

• The field notes sit in a left margin on a wide screen and drop above their paragraph on a narrow one. That reads correctly, and it does mean a note arrives before the sentence it belongs to rather than beside it.
• The ledger of records scrolls sideways on a phone. Four columns of dates and distances defeated every alternative, so the same information is repeated as cards underneath it on the blocks page.
• The look up is nine fields. On a small screen that is a long form, and the only honest mitigation is that nothing on the rest of the site needs it.

For anything not on that list, [email protected] reaches a person rather than a queue, and the reply comes inside two working days.

Standing on the ground

This is the part a field book can genuinely help with, so every record states it.

• Pavement is named, including the blocks that have none on one side, or none at all.
• Crossings are counted where they matter, and a record says when a block cannot be circled without crossing a road with no signal.
• Kerb cuts get mentioned when they are missing, because on a block with six driveways and no kerb cut that is the walking surface.
• Shade is described by side and by hour, which in this city is an access question rather than a comfort one.
• Ditches and culverts are flagged. An open ditch with no pavement beside it is a hard no for a wheelchair and worth knowing before setting out.
• Heat is the constraint from May to October, and any record walked in it says so at the top.

If a record leaves out something a reader needed, that is a fault in the record. Write in and it is added, with the correction dated like any other.

The standard

WCAG 2.2 level AA is the target and, by the checks run here, the site meets it. Those checks were run by the person who built the site, which is not the same as an outside audit and should not be read as one. No badge, seal or certificate is displayed anywhere, because none has been earned.