WCAG 2.2 AA, and the four things that go past it.
Captions on everything, audio description on the archive, a dyslexia-friendly mode, British Sign Language on the things that matter most, and a keyboard path through every screen on this site including the ones with a map in them.
What is done, and what is honestly not.
| Requirement | State | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Captions on all video | Done | Written and timed by a person. Automatic captions are not captions |
| Audio description | Done on the archive | All forty chapters. Not yet on the field cameras, which are live and silent anyway |
| A keyboard path through everything | Done | Including the field map, the patch grid and the configurator |
| Visible focus, 3:1 against its background | Done | A two-pixel ochre ring that is deliberately impossible to miss |
| Targets of at least 24 by 24 pixels | Done | The 2.2 requirement. Most are 44, which is the comfortable size |
| Nothing that requires a drag | Done | Every slider and every map has a button and a keyboard equivalent |
| Help in the same place on every page | Done | Bothering Us, bottom left, on all five hundred pages |
| Authentication without a memory test | Done | Email link or password manager. No puzzles, no picture grids |
| A dyslexia-friendly mode | Done | Beyond AA. Detailed below |
| British Sign Language | Partly | On the safety, visiting and terms pages. Not on all five hundred |
| Reduced motion | Done | Honoured everywhere, and there is a page about how |
| A full audit by an external tester | Not done | This is a demonstration build and has not been independently audited |
01/ 04
The four things that go past the standard.
A dyslexia-friendly mode
One switch. It changes the typeface to a high-legibility face with distinguishable letterforms, opens the line height to 1.7, removes every justified paragraph, drops the measure to about sixty characters and puts an off-white ground behind body text instead of a white one.
It also turns off the display serif in headings, which is the part people notice most and the part we were most reluctant about. It stays on across the whole site and across sessions.
- 1.7
- line height
- ~60ch
- measure
- 0
- justified text
Audio description on all forty chapters
A described audio track, written and read by a person, covering the visual information in every chapter of the record: what is in the field, what the machine is doing, what the expression on somebody’s face is doing.
It took four months and it is the single most expensive accessibility decision on this build. It is also the one that changed the most for the people who needed it.
- 40
- chapters
- 4 months
- to write
- 1
- human narrator
BSL on the things that matter most
Not on five hundred pages, which would be a claim we could not keep. On the pages where getting it wrong has a consequence: how to visit safely, what the age rules are, what the terms actually say, and what to do if something goes wrong.
Nine pages, filmed with a qualified interpreter, and the list of which nine is published rather than implied.
- 9
- pages
- 1
- qualified interpreter
- Published
- which nine
A keyboard path through the maps
The field map, the patch grid, the locator and the configurator are all operable from the keyboard alone, with a visible focus ring and an ordered path that matches the visual layout rather than the source order.
This is the part that most sites quietly fail, because a map is genuinely hard. The fallback is a list — every map on this site has a list behind it carrying the same information.
- 4
- interactive surfaces
- 0
- keyboard traps
- 1
- list behind every map
How to turn any of it on.
The dyslexia mode
In Faffing, under display, or from the footer on any page. One switch, and it persists.
Captions
On by default on every video. Turning them off is the deliberate action, not turning them on.
Audio description
A second audio track on the player, selected the same way as a language would be.
Reduced motion
Honoured automatically from your system setting. There is no switch because there does not need to be one.
Larger text
Browser zoom to 200 per cent, which everything here is built to survive without a horizontal scrollbar.
What we would fix first, given a budget.
An external audit, before anything else. Everything on this page is a self-assessment, and the whole history of accessibility statements is organisations grading their own homework generously.
Then BSL on more than nine pages, because nine is a start rather than a position. Then described audio on the field cameras, which is genuinely difficult — describing a live camera pointed at a hedge for eleven hours is a real problem nobody has solved well.
And then the thing nobody puts on these lists: testing with people who actually use screen readers, in the room, on the real site, rather than running an automated checker and declaring victory. Automated tools find about a third of what matters.
Accessibility, questioned.
It is built to WCAG 2.2 AA and has not been independently audited, which means we believe it and cannot prove it. Both halves of that sentence matter.
Because interpreting five hundred pages properly is a very large amount of work and doing nine well is better than doing five hundred badly. The nine are the ones where being wrong has a consequence.
Tell us through Bothering Us. It goes to a person, and accessibility reports go to the top of the queue rather than into it.
No. It changes typeface, spacing, measure and ground. Every word is the same word.
The full accessibility statement.
Including what is not done, who to tell, and how quickly we answer.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/estate/the-money/
/estate/recording/
/estate/sitemap/
