Accessibility

Why this statement is voluntary

Neither of the European rules that mandate an accessibility statement applies here. The Web Accessibility Directive covers public sector bodies, which this is not. The European Accessibility Act covers specified commercial services such as e-commerce and banking, and an editorial site that sells nothing is not among them.

We publish this anyway, for a plain reason: a site about whether tools work for a mixed ability class has no business being hard to use itself. Treat what follows as a description of the current state rather than a conformance claim, because we have not run an audit and we say so below.

What the site does

• Pages are ordinary HTML with real headings, lists and links, so a screen reader and a reader mode both get a sensible document.
• A skip link is the first thing in the tab order on every page, so keyboard users can jump past the header.
• Everything works with the keyboard, including the small-screen menu. That menu is a native disclosure element rather than a scripted one, so it also opens with JavaScript turned off or blocked.
• Focus is visible. The site does not remove focus outlines.
• Animation is limited to small entrance effects, and all of it is switched off for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion. Nothing moves, flashes or plays on its own.
• Text is real text, not pictures of text, and it reflows when you zoom or narrow the window. Fonts are served from this domain, so text still renders if an external font service is blocked.
• Every page states its language, and the English and German versions point at each other, so assistive technology announces the right one.
• No pop-ups, no interstitials, no cookie banner, no autoplaying media, no carousel.
• Colour contrast is measured, not assumed. Every text and background pair the design uses is checked against WCAG 2.1 AA automatically whenever the site is built, and the build fails if one falls below the threshold. The weakest pair currently sits at 4.8:1 against a requirement of 4.5:1, and most are far higher.

That last check found two real problems when it was first run, which is the reason to automate it rather than eyeball it. The copyright line in the footer sat at 4.42:1, just under the requirement, and the suffix in the site logo only passed because it counts as large text. Both were faded text, where the fault is invisible until you compute it. Both are fixed, and the check now runs on every build so a future design change cannot reintroduce them quietly.

What we have not done

This is the part that keeps the rest honest.

• No WCAG audit, formal or informal. We cannot tell you which level this site would reach.
• No testing with screen readers, magnification or voice control, and no testing with disabled users. The claims above come from how the site is built, not from watching anybody use it.
• The contrast check above covers the pairs the design declares. It proves those pass; it does not prove that no other combination exists somewhere on the site, because working that out from the stylesheet alone is a browser's job rather than a script's.
• The decorative icons are hidden from assistive technology, which is correct, but we have not checked every one of them individually.

Reporting a barrier

Write to info@no1leftbehind.eu and describe what you were trying to do and what stopped you. Your browser and any assistive technology you use help, but do not worry about diagnosing it; describing the problem is enough and is more useful than a guess at the cause.

We will reply. If it can be fixed we will fix it, and if it cannot be fixed quickly we will say why and add it to the list above rather than letting it disappear. There is no formal enforcement route to point you at, because as set out at the top of this page the statutory schemes do not cover this site. That makes the honest handling of a report our own responsibility rather than a procedure, which is stated deliberately.