Accessibility

Our target

We aim to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA across every page, in both English and Spanish.

Accessibility matters unusually much for this material. A significant share of our readers arrive in the first hours after a death, often on a phone, often on a poor connection, and frequently unable to read carefully. Design decisions we made for that reader — larger body text, 1.75 line height, a 62-character measure, no motion that draws attention to itself — are the same decisions accessibility asks for.

What we do

• Semantic structure. One h1 per page, no skipped heading levels, real landmarks, and a skip link that becomes visible on focus.
• Keyboard operation throughout. The command bar, theme toggle, language switcher and every disclosure work by keyboard, with focus trapped inside the search dialog and restored when it closes.
• A focus ring we never remove, 2px with 2px offset, and scroll-margin-top matched to the sticky header so a focused target is never hidden behind it.
• Targets sized at a minimum of 24×24 CSS pixels, and 44×44 on touch.
• No drag-only interactions.
• Contrast validated at build time. Body copy is never set on blurred glass — reading surfaces are solid.
• Motion, transparency and contrast preferences honoured via prefers-reduced-motion, prefers-reduced-transparency and prefers-contrast.
• Everything readable without JavaScript. The heading, the answer and the crisis resource block paint from CSS alone.
• Charts, where used, ship a data table and are labelled. We prefer tables to charts here anyway.
• Help and contact appear in the same footer position on every page.

How we test

Automated axe-core checks and a contrast validator run in our build, and the build fails on any violation. Automated testing catches perhaps half of what matters, so each page template also gets a manual pass with a screen reader.

What we know is imperfect

• Screen reader coverage is not yet complete across all templates. Manual NVDA and VoiceOver passes are done per template rather than per page, so a page using an unusual combination of components may not have been heard end to end.
• Self-hosted fonts are not yet in place. The site currently falls through to your platform’s humanist sans. This is visually fine and functionally fine, but it means typography varies more between devices than intended.
• Spanish coverage is partial. Pages awaiting native review are English-only for now, and say so.

We would rather list these than claim conformance we have not earned.

Reporting a barrier

If something here does not work for you, please tell us — what you were trying to do, the page, and the assistive technology you were using if you are comfortable saying. We treat accessibility reports as bugs, not as feedback.