Accessibility

The target

coderdude.com aims to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That is the standard usually referenced under the Americans with Disabilities Act and adopted more or less everywhere else, and it is the bar I hold the site to.

This is a self-assessment. No third party has audited the site, and I am not going to claim conformance I have not had checked. What follows is what I have verified myself, stated as precisely as I can.

What the site does

• Keyboard access. Everything you can do with a mouse you can do with a keyboard. Every page starts with a "skip to content" link, and focus is shown with a two-pixel gold outline that clears the contrast requirement against every surface on the site.
• Contrast. Every text colour has been measured against the surface it sits on. The lowest is a little over 4.5:1; most of the page is well past 9:1, which is AAA.
• Motion. If your system asks for reduced motion, the drifting particles are switched off entirely, animations and transitions are cut, and content appears rather than sliding in. Nothing important is conveyed by movement.
• The rotating project list on the home page can be paused, stepped through manually, and it remembers that you paused it.
• Structure. Real landmarks, a single main heading per page, and a proper table - with row and column headers - behind the table view on the builds page.
• Forms. Every field has a real label, whether or not that label is visible. Form results are announced to screen readers rather than only appearing on screen.
• Text. The layout is built in relative units, so browser zoom and larger default text sizes reflow rather than clip.
• Images. Decorative graphics are hidden from assistive technology instead of being read out as noise.

Known gaps

These are real, they are mine, and they are on the list. If one of them is what stands between you and something you need, email me and I will move it up or simply send you the information directly.

• The search dialog does not trap focus. Opening it with the search button or Ctrl/Cmd+K puts focus in the input, but tabbing past the end walks into the page behind it instead of cycling, and closing it does not return focus to the button you opened it from. Escape does close it.
• Form errors are not tied to their fields. If a submission fails validation, you get one message for the whole form rather than a specific error attached to the field that caused it.
• The mobile menu does not close on Escape, and links on the page behind it stay reachable by keyboard while it is open.
• Some heading levels skip a rank in the footer, which can make the outline read oddly in a screen reader's heading list.
• Contrast over the background image. The measurements above are against the site's flat surface colours. A few panels sit over a photographic background, and I have not yet verified every one of those against rendered pixels rather than declared colours.

How it has been tested

Keyboard-only navigation on every page, contrast measured numerically for every colour token against every surface it is used on, and the layout checked with reduced-motion enabled and at increased zoom.

What has not happened yet: a full pass with a screen reader on real hardware, testing with voice control, and an independent audit. Until those happen I would rather say so than imply a level of assurance that is not there.

Telling me something is broken

If any part of this site is hard or impossible for you to use, email hello at coderdude dot com . Tell me what page you were on, what you were trying to do, and what you use to browse - that last part helps more than anything else.

I reply within two business days. If a fix will take longer than that, I will tell you when to expect it, and in the meantime I will get you whatever the page was supposed to give you by another route.

This is not a formality. It is a site built by one person, the list of gaps above is honest, and a specific report from someone who hit one is the most useful thing I can get.