Accessibility statement

This statement is about the Opcela website. It says what we are aiming at, what we know is not right yet, and what to do if you cannot use part of the site.

We would rather publish a short honest statement than a confident one. Everything below is something we have checked or something we know we have not.

The standard we are working to

We are building this website to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 at level AA.

We are not claiming that we meet it. No independent accessibility audit of this site has been carried out, by us or by anybody else, so nobody has verified a claim of conformance and we are not going to make one. What follows is our own review, and the gaps in it are the gaps we found ourselves.

When we last looked

The date at the top of this page is the day we last reviewed both this statement and the site it describes, and everything below describes the site as it stood then.

We will review it again whenever the site changes materially, and at least once a year. If you find something this statement does not mention, that is worth telling us about on its own: it means our review missed it.

What we have done

These are the things we have built deliberately, and checked.

• The site can be used with a keyboard alone. Every menu, button, link and form control can be reached and operated by keyboard, and whatever has focus is drawn with a visible ring that is distinct from the hover state. Focus is not hidden behind the header when you move down a page.
• The page menus close on Escape and return focus to the control that opened them. The menu on a small screen holds focus while it is open, and the image viewer is a browser dialogue, so the browser itself supplies the focus handling and the Escape key.
• Motion is restrained, and it stops if you ask it to. If your device is set to reduce motion, every transition and every travelling animation on the site collapses to nothing, and the one continuously animated heading does not start at all. That heading also carries a pause button, which is reachable by keyboard.
• Every image has to have a text alternative. The site refuses to build if one is missing, so an image published without a description is not something that can reach the site by accident.
• The contact form lists its errors above itself and moves focus to that list. Each entry is a link to the field it is about, each field is marked as invalid, and each error message says what to do rather than only what is wrong.
• Text is set at a comfortable measure, pages are built to use headings in order so that a screen reader can be used to move around them, and the page language is declared as British English so that a screen reader chooses the right voice.
• There is no video, no audio, no PDF and no embedded content from anybody else on this site, so there are no captions, transcripts or third-party components to be accountable for.

Problems we know about

These are things you may actually run into on this site. Each one says what goes wrong and who it affects.

The page you are shown when an address does not exist

If you follow a broken or mistyped link to this site, the page you get is a default supplied by the software the site is built with, rather than one we have designed. If your device is set to a dark theme, the explanatory line on it does not meet the minimum contrast requirement, so it is hard to read for anybody with low vision. On a light theme it passes, narrowly. Designing that page properly is outstanding work.

Several things stop working if JavaScript does not run

Most of this site works without JavaScript, including the contact form, which sends an enquiry and confirms it normally. These do not:

• The menus in the header do not open. The button that opens the products menu, and on a small screen the button that opens the whole menu, do nothing without JavaScript. Every link in them is repeated in the footer, so no page becomes unreachable, but you would have to go to the bottom of the page to find it.
• The right-hand end of a wide table cannot be reached with the keyboard. What makes a wide table scrollable by keyboard is added after the page has loaded, so without JavaScript a keyboard user cannot see the columns that are off the edge. This affects anybody who does not use a mouse.
• The control that opens an image at full size is not shown, so a diagram can only be seen at the size it is drawn on the page. This matters most where the detail in the picture is the point of it.
• The contact form falls back to the wording your browser supplies when a field is wrong, rather than ours. Our wording says what to do about the problem; the browser's usually only names it.

If your enquiry cannot be sent

If sending fails altogether, the message saying so appears below the send button. A screen reader announces it, but focus is not moved to it, so if you are working down the page with a keyboard the message appears behind where you are and is easy to miss. You would be left looking at a form that appears to have done nothing.

Decorative images are described rather than skipped

Every image on this site must carry a text description, and there is no way to mark one as decorative so that a screen reader passes over it. That is a deliberate trade, because the commoner and worse fault is a meaningful image with no description at all, but it means a screen reader will read out a description of a picture that carries no information.

The menus do not respond to the arrow keys

The header menus open, close and can be worked through with Tab and Escape, and nothing in them is unreachable. They do not move between items with the arrow keys, which somebody used to that pattern may expect and may take for the menu being broken.

Pages are slower to load and settle than they should be

Work on this is outstanding and is being done shortly after launch. It is an accessibility matter and not only a convenience: a page that moves about while it is still arriving is harder to use with a switch, a head pointer or a magnifier, and a slow one is harder for everybody.

One page is not built for visitors

There is a page at /styleguide which is a working reference for the people building the site. Nothing links to it, it is kept out of search results, and it is not held to the standard above. If you find yourself on it, it is not a page written for you.

The limits of our testing

No independent accessibility audit of this site has been carried out. Automatic checks do run before any change is published: they cover the colour pairings the design permits in both the light and the dark theme, that every image carries a text description, that every animation collapses when reduced motion is asked for, that the home page has a main heading, and that no page scrolls sideways at five screen widths. That is narrower than the standard. We have not tested the site with the browser zoomed in, with text spacing increased, with a forced colour mode such as Windows High Contrast, or end to end with a screen reader, and we have not verified the contrast of text read against the partly transparent header, because our check measures the colours the design allows rather than the ones a page finally renders. So where this statement is silent about something, it may mean we found no problem, or it may mean we have not yet looked. If you find one, the section below is what it is for.

Telling us about a problem

If there is something on this website you cannot use, please tell us. You do not need to know why it is happening or what the standard says. Telling us what you were trying to do, what happened, and what you were using to do it, is enough and it is genuinely useful.

We will reply within five working days. If a fix is quick we will make it and tell you when it is live. If it is not quick we will tell you what we are going to do and roughly when, and we will add it to the list above so that everybody can see it.

If you need something on this site in another format, ask us for it in the same way and we will send it to you.

We are not a public sector body, so the statutory enforcement route for public sector websites does not apply here. That does not change what we owe you, and we would much rather hear about a problem than have you go elsewhere. Write to us at: