What we have tested, and what we have not

Colour contrast was measured on the pages as a browser actually paints them, not read out of the stylesheet, which is the usual shortcut and misses text sitting on a tint or a photograph. Around 300 pieces of text were checked and none failed. Where text sits on a photograph the tool records it as unchecked rather than passed, because a photograph has no single colour behind it.

Every button, link and form control was measured at phone width against the 24 by 24 pixel target size: 1,293 of them across 18 pages, one of every kind of page on this site, and none is smaller than that. One was, a three letter town name in the coverage table at 23 pixels wide, and it was fixed the same day it was found.

Every page has one main region, one page heading, headings that run in order without skipping a level, and a “skip to the main content” link as the first thing you reach with the keyboard. The pins on the coverage map are real buttons with names, and they work with Enter and Space.

The enquiry form labels every field, and when something is missing it tells you which field, moves you to it, and announces it rather than showing a message floating on its own.

This page said a systematic keyboard pass had not been done. It has now, on the home page, using real key presses rather than a script moving focus about, which matters because the two behave differently and only one of them is what you get.

The first thing the Tab key reaches is the “skip to the main content” link. Focus was then walked through roughly forty stops to the foot of the page. It never vanished, never got stuck anywhere it could not be tabbed out of, and followed the order things appear in. Every stop showed the same three pixel orange focus ring, including the form fields, which have their own rule so the ring does not disappear against a white box.

Four things were measured across the home page, the price list and the research page, in a browser at phone width rather than read out of the stylesheet: that every clickable thing shows a hand cursor, that nothing clickable is smaller than 24 pixels once you count the label around it, that nothing tiny is hiding in the page, and that no invisible element is sitting on top of a control. Two faults came out of it and both are fixed: the buttons were showing an arrow instead of a hand, and the five star rating on the reviews carried a label in a place the rules do not allow, which meant a screen reader would have announced nothing at all where the stars are. An automated scan of six kinds of page now comes back clean on every one.

Nobody has used this site with a screen reader. That is the honest position and it has not changed. What was done on 26 September is a different and smaller thing: the page was read through the accessibility tree, which is the structure a screen reader is handed, to check that every control announces a sensible name. It does. The questions that only a real session answers, whether the thing makes sense read aloud, whether you can actually get a price without seeing the screen, whether anything is announced twice or in a baffling order, are still unanswered.

We are not going to describe reading the tree as a screen reader test. It is the difference between checking a car has an engine and driving it.

We are not claiming this site meets WCAG 2.2 AA, because no full audit against it has been carried out. WCAG is the standard we are building to and the one we measure against, and saying we conform to it on the strength of the checks above would be exactly the overclaim this page exists to avoid.

There is a real duty here and it is worth naming properly. Under the Equality Act 2010 a service provider has to make reasonable adjustments, that duty is anticipatory, and it applies whatever the size of the business. What the law does not do, for a private business like this one, is attach a particular technical standard to it. WCAG is our working target by convention, not because a statute names it.

Tell us and we will fix it, and we will tell you when it is done. That is not a customer service line: a fault you hit is worth more to us than another round of testing, because you have found something real.

Use the contact form, and if the form itself is the thing giving you trouble, say so in any way you can reach us and we will take it from there.

There is no accessibility overlay or accessibility widget, and there will not be one. They are sold as a fix and they are not one: the accessibility has to be in the markup, which is where ours is.

There are no popups, no interstitials, no cookie wall and nothing that has to be dismissed before you can read the page. The only fixed element is the bar at the bottom with the price link in it, and the page reads fine around it.