Accessibility
What was tested,
and what has not been.
I tell boards whether a programme will stand up to scrutiny, so this site should be able to answer the same question about itself. What follows is what was actually tested, on what date, and what has not been tested yet — rather than a claim of compliance nobody could check.
This site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA. It was last tested on 17 August 2026, and is due to be tested again by 17 August 2027.
What was tested
- An automated pass with axe-core against the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 A and AA rulesets, plus its best-practice set, on all ten pages — the nine this site publishes and the 404. It reports no violations. The script is in the repository and runs against the built site, so it is repeatable rather than a one-off assertion.
- The same pass again at a 390-pixel viewport, because a layout that reflows can pass on a desktop and fail on a phone. It reports no violations there either.
- A scripted keyboard pass on every page: every tab stop reachable, a visible focus indicator on each one, no keyboard traps, and the skip link as the first stop.
- Heading order checked on every page — one h1, no skipped levels.
- Rendered with reduced motion preferred, to confirm nothing stays hidden behind an animation that never runs.
- Colour contrast measured against the brand’s own palette rather than eyeballed, on every ground the site uses. Two colours have had to change rather than the pages: the supporting grey in August 2026, and the accent gold on 17 August, after it measured 4.20:1 as small text on a tinted background. Text now clears AA on every ground here.
- The audit measures the settled page. It waits for the webfonts and switches the animations off first, because testing mid-fade reports on content that has not finished rendering — which produced a pass about three runs in four and a false failure on the fourth.
- The typefaces are served from this site rather than from a third party, so no font request tells anyone else that you loaded a page.
What is not tested yet
It has not been tested with a screen reader by a person.
The automated and scripted passes above are real and repeatable, and they are not the same thing as somebody using this site with VoiceOver or NVDA. Until that has happened I am not claiming conformance, only that everything I have been able to test passes. That pass is scheduled, and whatever it finds will be listed here.
The keyboard pass is scripted rather than human.
A script tabs through every page and checks that each stop is reachable and visibly focused. It cannot tell whether the resulting order makes sense to somebody who is actually trying to get something done, which is a different question and the more important one.
Reporting a problem
If you find something on this site you cannot use, tell me and I will fix it. Email tom@bowers-advisory.co.uk. I will acknowledge within one working day, tell you what I am going to do about it, and list it above until it is done.