Accessibility

Chatter Snow wants this website to work for everyone who comes to it — including people using a screen reader, a keyboard and no mouse, magnification, speech input, or a browser set to larger text, higher contrast or less motion.

The standard we build and test against is WCAG 2.2 Level AA. We are not claiming we have met it. What we can tell you is what is tested, how, and what that testing cannot see — which is the rest of this page, so that you can weigh the claim rather than take our word for it.

If something here gets in your way, tell us at info@chattersnow.org. You don't need to know what the problem is called or which rule it breaks.

Our target is Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 — WCAG, the W3C's standard for what makes a web page usable by people with disabilities. Among a great many other things, that means every page can be operated with the keyboard alone, text and controls meet a minimum contrast, images carry a text alternative, form fields have real labels, and nothing depends on your seeing a colour, hearing a sound or noticing a movement.

This statement covers this public website. It does not cover the signed-in area our staff and volunteers use to run the organization. That area is built from the same components and checked the same way, but it has known problems this website does not, and folding the two together would tell you something that isn't true of either.

Every page of this site is checked automatically before a change to it can be released, and that check is broader than a one-off audit:

• Every page, not a sample. The list of pages to check is derived from the site itself rather than kept by hand, so a page added today is covered today.
• The whole rule set. The checks run the axe-core rules for WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2, at levels A and AA.
• Both themes, both sizes. Light and dark, phone width and desktop width — a contrast failure or a tap target that is too small can exist in one and not the other.
• What only exists once you open it. Dialogs, slide-over panels, dropdowns, tab panels and the error state of a form are opened and checked too, not just the page as it first loads.
• A written record of what is already known. Outstanding failures are listed in the code, and a failure that is not on that list stops the release — so something that has been fixed cannot quietly come back.

Alongside that, parts of the site have been worked through with the keyboard alone, and the shared controls most likely to trap somebody — the dropdown menus among them — have keyboard tests of their own that run with everything else.

Every accessibility failure we currently know about is in the staff area, not on this public website.

An automated check finds a minority of the barriers that exist. It can tell that an image has no text alternative; it cannot tell whether the alternative somebody wrote is any good, whether a page's headings make sense read aloud, whether an error message says what to do next, or whether a form can actually be completed by someone who cannot see it. Those need a person.

No full screen-reader pass has been done across this site. Keyboard operation has been checked by hand in places, and individual components have been fixed after being tested that way. A complete pass over every page with VoiceOver or NVDA has not happened.

So our conformance claim is partial rather than complete. Partial is the accurate word for a claim resting on thorough automated coverage and incomplete manual coverage, and we would rather give you that than a headline you can't check.

A page can also regress between releases in a way the automated checks do not catch. If you hit something, the fastest route to it being fixed is you telling us.

Some of what you meet on this site is outside what the testing above reaches, and it is better to say so than to let the claim cover it:

• Where a link takes you. We link to partners, venues and other organizations. We choose what to link and we can stop linking it, but we do not control how those sites are built and make no claim about them.
• Documents rather than pages. If we link a PDF, a spreadsheet or a slide deck, it is not covered by the checks above and may not be accessible at all. Ask us and we will find another way to get you what is in it.
• What is typed into the site. The words, the images and the descriptions of those images are written by people at our organization. The software makes an accessible page possible; it cannot make a photograph's description a good one.
• Our events, our venues and anything on paper. Whether a building has step-free access, whether a room has a hearing loop, whether an activity can be adapted — none of that is a question about this website, and this page cannot answer it. Ask us before you come.

Email info@chattersnow.org. Tell us which page you were on, what you were trying to do and what happened instead. If you know what you were using — a screen reader and which one, the keyboard alone, magnification, voice control, a phone rather than a computer — that helps us reproduce it, but none of it is required. "The menu doesn't open when I press Enter" is a perfectly good report.

You are not complaining, and you do not need to be sure the fault is ours. We would rather look into something and find it was not than never hear about it.

If a barrier here is stopping you doing what you came here to do, say so, and tell us how to reach you. We would rather get you there another way while the page is being fixed than leave you waiting for it.

The date at the top of this page is when this text last changed.

The automated part of what it describes is not an audit from an earlier date: it runs against every change to this site, so what is written above about testing is true of the version you are reading now.

The parts only a person can do — the screen-reader pass, and whether the words on our pages read well aloud — are the parts a date matters for. When that work is done, this page is where it will be written down.