Accessibility Statement.

§ 01Conformance status

The Code Abides is committed to substantive accessibility — not best-effort, not aspiration. Our conformance target is firm and singular:

Where a specific page or feature does not yet meet AA, it is named in § 03 below alongside the timeframe for correction. At the time of publication, no such limitations are recorded.

§ 02How we verified this

WCAG 2.2 Level AA defines around fifty success criteria. Automated tooling can detect roughly thirty to forty percent of them; the remainder require manual review. Our verification combines both, executed pre-launch, on any significant content or design change, and as part of an annual review.

Automated checks

• Lighthouse (Chrome DevTools) — accessibility heuristics, target score ≥ 95.
• axe DevTools (browser extension) — surfaces approximately forty percent of WCAG criteria automatically; target zero violations and zero serious issues on every distinct page.
• WAVE (browser extension or wave.webaim.org) — visual overlay confirming heading hierarchy, landmark structure, and contrast at a glance; target zero errors and zero contrast errors.
• WebAIM Contrast Checker — spot-checks for colour combinations not covered by automated scanners, including focus indicators on accent colours.

Manual checks

• Keyboard-only navigation — every interactive element reachable, operable, and visibly focused; no focus traps; the skip-to-content link works as expected.
• Screen-reader smoke test — home page, journal index, an individual journal entry, and a complete contact form submission, navigated by ear.
• Mobile screen reader — same set of pages on iOS Safari with VoiceOver, with particular attention to the contact form and the Cloudflare Turnstile widget.
• Reflow at 320 px viewport — no horizontal scroll, no clipped or overlapping content.
• Browser zoom to 400 % on a 1280-wide window — content reflows, no functionality lost.
• Text-spacing override (line-height 1.5, paragraph spacing 2×, letter-spacing 0.12em, word-spacing 0.16em) — no clipped text or broken layouts.
• Reduced motion — with prefers-reduced-motion enabled at OS level, the snowflakes and elevator-panel cycling disable or substantially reduce.
• Forms — invalid input produces an error that is announced by the screen reader, and focus moves to the first invalid field.

Each audit produces a dated record naming the auditor, tools and versions, pages tested, and assistive-technology / browser / OS combinations. Audit records are retained internally alongside our records of processing.

§ 03Known limitations

Any criterion not currently met would be listed here, with the reason and the intended fix date. The section heading is retained even when the list is empty so that future limitations have a place to live.

No known limitations are recorded at the time of publication.

§ 04Compatibility

This site is tested on the current versions of the following browsers and assistive technologies. It is built to standards that should work in older browsers too, but we verify only against the configurations below.

Browsers tested

Assistive technologies tested

§ 05Reporting an accessibility barrier

If you encounter a barrier on this site — anything that prevents you reading, navigating, or using the contact form — we want to know. A short, honest, technically-grounded report carries more weight than a long generic one, but any report is welcome.

Email info@thecodeabides.co.uk. Where possible, please include the URL, a brief description of what went wrong, and the browser and assistive technology you were using.

Our commitment in response:

• Acknowledgement within two working days — confirming we have received the report and a person is looking at it.
• Resolution within two working weeks where practical — with a clear interim message if the fix needs longer or depends on a third-party component.

A pattern of similar reports prompts an interim full re-audit rather than just a point fix.

§ 06Dates and review

• Date of preparation — 28 April 2026.
• Date of last review — 8 May 2026.
• Review cadence — at minimum annually, and on any significant content or design change.

If a third-party report identifies a barrier, the affected criterion is logged and triaged on receipt; a recurring pattern triggers an interim full re-audit.