A site that meets the accessibility standard

Situation. A consultancy that sells engineering judgement and ships an inaccessible website has a credibility problem before it has an accessibility one. The site also has an unusually wide surface for it: three languages, two colour themes, a full print stylesheet, a dark‑first palette, hand‑drawn annotations and an illustrated character — every one of which is a way to fail a criterion in one configuration while passing it in another.

Task. The site had to conform to WCAG 2.2 at Level AA across every page, every language and both themes, and the conformance had to be defended by checks rather than asserted in a document.

Action. A conformance record documents every criterion in scope, each row naming what satisfies it and what checks it. Two Level AAA criteria are taken beyond the target — visual presentation in full, and focus appearance, which is offered rather than claimed. The automation runs an accessibility rule engine with its best‑practice rules enabled rather than only the conformance ones, which is a thirty‑rule difference and mattered immediately: one of the extra rules failed the moment it was switched on, because the brand mark sat outside every landmark on every inner page. A second, slower check runs thirty‑two representative pages across two colour schemes and two widths, and what it asserts is unusual: focus is proven in pixels rather than in the document, by pressing the tab key for real and comparing screenshots, because identical pixels mean the user cannot tell where focus is regardless of what the markup says. It also walks the whole page looking for a keyboard trap, applies the specified text‑spacing overrides, doubles the root font size, and measures line length, justification, centring and paragraph spacing.

Result. Conformance is claimed at Level AA in three languages and two themes, with two AAA criteria beyond it and one named as an exception, and every claim has a check behind it. The hardest of them was contrast over the photograph, which an automated rule engine reports as unevaluable and which the site had been defending with an argument rather than a number: the real figures were 49 of 64 page and theme pairs below AA. Two surfaces the design had never owned turned out to be the cause, and the check that found them is a floor now — every pair must carry AA over the wall the build draws, and any pair that does not fails the build. What the site says on its own credits page is the honest part: no automated tool finds more than about a third of WCAG failures, the labels that appear on hover cannot be dismissed with a key because that needs a script and this site runs one, and there has been no testing with real assistive technology — those limits are written where a reader will see them rather than left out of the claim.