Accessibility Statement

We want this site to work for everyone who comes to it — including people who use a screen reader, who navigate by keyboard alone, and who rely on the accessibility settings in their operating system.

Our conformance target is WCAG 2.1 Level AA.

Who we build for

People with visual impairments, including blindness, low vision and colour blindness. People who are deaf or hard of hearing. People with motor or dexterity impairments, including anyone who cannot use a mouse. People with cognitive or neurological differences, including anyone for whom movement on a screen is a barrier.

What we have done

Every item here is in the code today.

• An accessibility panel, reachable from the footer of every page. Four preferences: reduce motion, reduce transparency, increase contrast, larger text. Your choices are kept on your device and re-applied before the page paints, so you never see a flash of the wrong setting. They sit on top of your system settings, never in place of them.
• Reduced motion is the default when your system asks for it. Our animations are written inside a prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference rule, so a browser requesting reduced motion is never sent them. The scroll reveals and counters do not run at all. A site-wide rule collapses anything left over.
• Visible keyboard focus. A two-pixel outline with an offset, applied site-wide through :focus-visible, so it appears when you navigate by keyboard without adding a ring to mouse clicks.
• Structure carries the meaning, not styling. One h1 per page, and heading levels are computed from how sections nest, so a level cannot be skipped by accident. Every page has a main region, a labelled navigation region and a footer. The FAQ is a native details/summary. The accessibility panel is a native modal dialog, so focus containment and close-on-Escape come from the browser rather than from our own script. The mobile menu is a real button that reports whether it is open and closes on Escape.
• Forms announce what happens. A validation error is announced as an alert and the field is marked invalid; confirmations are announced too.
• Images cannot be published without alt text. A new image will not save into the site until it has been described.
• Right-to-left is structural, not a patch. The site is published in 21 languages, two of which — Arabic and Hebrew — read right to left. Text direction is set on the page from the language, spacing uses logical start and end properties throughout rather than fixed left and right, and the animations that travel horizontally have mirrored versions.
• We do not block zoom. Nothing in our pages prevents pinch zoom or browser zoom.
• Automated checks run when we deploy. Lighthouse's accessibility audit runs against six representative pages on each deploy verification.

What we know is not right yet

• There is no skip link. Every page has a main region that a screen reader can jump to, but there is no visible "skip to content" link for someone navigating by keyboard alone.
• Secondary text does not meet the contrast target in our default theme. In August 2026 we measured our own colours against the page background across ten representative pages at a 390px width, compositing transparency rather than assuming it away. Thirty-three distinct combinations of colour and use fall below the 4.5:1 ratio Level AA asks for, and none is set large enough to fall back on the 3:1 allowance for large text. The worst is 1.50:1; our brand teal used as text on a light surface measures between 1.69:1 and 1.91:1. The "increase contrast" preference clears all thirty-three — we re-ran the same measurement with it on and found no failures — but it is a choice you have to make, and the default has not changed. This is the largest known gap.
• Our videos are not captioned. Neither the videos we host ourselves nor the ones we embed carry caption or subtitle tracks today.
• The Quarterly is a PDF, and we do not claim that PDF is accessible. We have not verified it against the target above. It never ships alone: an issue cannot be published without the parallel text of its articles as ordinary web pages, and the reader page always carries a plain download link that works with JavaScript switched off.
• Some pages contain other people's players. The video player, the radio player and the cookie notice are third-party code. Each loads only after you click, so nothing third-party runs before you ask for it, but we do not control what is inside them.
• Images carried over from our previous site may have no alt text. The rule above applies to new uploads. Images imported from the old site are exempt, so that editing an old page does not fail on a missing description. Filling those in is ongoing editorial work.
• Automated testing is a floor, not a proof. The Lighthouse audit is advisory: it does not block a release, it runs on six pages rather than all of them, and tools of that kind detect only a minority of accessibility problems.
• This statement is published in English only, like the rest of our legal pages.

Telling us about a problem

If something here blocks you, tell us. A specific report about one page is more useful to us than an audit.

Write to accessibility@electe.net. If you can, include the address of the page, what you were trying to do, and which browser and assistive technology you were using.

We will acknowledge your message within five working days, and within twenty working days we will tell you what we intend to do about it and when. Where a fix is not quick, we will give you the information or the service you were after in another form in the meantime — that part we do straight away, not at the end of the twenty days.