Accessibility

No conformance claim

This site has not been independently audited against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, so it does not claim to conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA or to any other level. A conformance claim is a statement about a completed evaluation. Making one without the evaluation is the accessibility equivalent of an invented licence number, and it is one of the commonest untrue sentences on a small business website.

What follows is what the site does, stated specifically enough that you can check it.

Structure and keyboard

• Semantic landmarks — a single header, nav, main and footer per page — and a skip link that is the first focusable element.
• One h1 per page and a heading outline that does not skip levels.
• Every interactive element is reachable and operable by keyboard, including the navigation panels, the drawer, the carousel, the accordions, the schedule table's pagination and view switch, and all four preference widgets.
• The accessibility panel and the mobile drawer are focus-trapped while open, close on Escape, and return focus to the control that opened them.
• The carousel has prev and next buttons, a tab list, arrow-key and Home/End support, and a live region that announces the current slide. It does not autoplay.
• The 3D object on the home page can be turned with the arrow keys as well as with a pointer, and hovering or focusing a legend entry raises the matching strand.
• A visible focus ring is drawn on every focusable element, in a colour that meets contrast against every surface it can appear on.

Contrast and colour

• Text contrast was measured on composited pixels — the colours that actually paint — in both themes and under all five palettes, not on declared values.
• Body text meets at least 4.5:1 and primary text at least 7:1 against its own surface. Every one of the five strand colours meets at least 3:1 against all three surfaces in both themes.
• A palette that could not pass was not shipped and then corrected at runtime; it was not shipped.
• Nothing on the site is conveyed by colour alone. Every chart series carries a dash pattern and a label drawn at the end of its own line; the stacked bars carry hatch patterns and a written legend with percentages.
• A high-contrast mode is available in the accessibility panel and repaints ink, ground and every border in both themes.

Motion

The site has an animated canvas, scroll-driven animation, a 3D element and pointer-tracked effects. All of them stop.

• The operating system's prefers-reduced-motion setting is respected by default.
• The accessibility panel can override it in both directions — someone who has reduced motion set globally but wants it here can turn it on.
• Reducing motion tears down the canvas animation loop rather than slowing it. A CSS rule cannot stop a requestAnimationFrame, and a still canvas that still burns a frame budget every sixteen milliseconds is not reduced motion. One static frame is painted and the loop is cancelled.
• Pointer-tracked effects are not installed at all under reduced motion, or on a coarse pointer.
• Scroll-driven animations are disabled and their elements resolve to their finished state, so nothing is hidden.
• Nothing on the site autoplays, flashes, or moves without the visitor having caused it.

Text and layout

• Three text sizes are available from the accessibility panel, applied to the root font size so every measurement in the system scales with them. The layout was checked at the largest step at 320 pixels wide.
• No horizontal scrolling at any width from 320 to 1920 pixels. Long tables and the carousel scroll inside their own containers; overflow-x: clip is not used anywhere, because hiding overflow from a measurement is not the same as not having it.
• Interactive targets are at least 44 by 44 pixels.
• Text can be resized with browser zoom to 200% without loss of content or function.
• An option to underline every link is available in the accessibility panel.

Forms and content

• Every field has a visible, programmatically associated label; hints are associated with aria-describedby; optional fields are marked as optional rather than required fields being marked as required.
• Validation uses the browser's own mechanism, so messages are announced.
• Confirmation states move focus so that a screen-reader user is told the form was submitted.
• Charts carry an accessible name and a text description of what they show, including the actual figures, because a path is not readable.
• Decorative graphics — the strand field, the braid diagrams, the icons inside labelled controls — are hidden from assistive technology rather than given invented alternative text.

What has not been done

• No independent audit, and no testing with real users of assistive technology.
• No formal screen-reader test matrix. The site has been driven by keyboard and checked structurally, which is not the same thing.
• No accessibility conformance report (VPAT or equivalent) exists.

A real business publishing an accessibility statement should commission the audit and then say what it found, including what it did not fix. That is more useful than a claim.

Telling us about a problem

On a working site this is where a monitored address and a response commitment would go.Ropewalk Mortgage Co. does not exist, so there is nobody to write to and it would be dishonest to print an address suggesting otherwise. If you are reading this as a template for a real site: put a real address here, commit to a response time, and mean it.