Accessibility statement

The site serves mainly US readers. Our target is WCAG 2.2 level AA across the whole site, and the design system is built around that goal.

What is in place, area by area, checked against the design system's rules.

• Status is never color alone: every tier shows a color, a glyph and a word. Countdowns carry their unit, days or hours. Text holds at least 4.5:1 contrast on its ground; glyphs and borders at least 3:1.
• Keyboard: links and buttons are native elements. Focus is always visible, a 3 pixel violet outline, and is never removed. A skip link is the first focusable element on every page. The slash key opens search, suggestions are a listbox, and Escape closes the list, then the field.
• Live updates: when a countdown ticks over it rewrites its accessible name along with the visible number, so a screen reader hears the new count.
• Hit targets: on phones, nav, in-page and footer links carry a 44 pixel box. On desktop every link is at least 24 pixels tall.
• Motion: only small color transitions are used, and all of them switch off under the reduced-motion setting.
• Structure: one h1 per page, headings in order, an in-page section nav on long pages, data tables with real column headers, lists as real lists, and the page language declared as English.
• Forms: fields have labels, status messages after a form is sent are announced through a live region, and an invalid email field is described by its error line.
• Tier tooltips: each status tier carries a one-line definition on hover and keyboard focus, read to screen readers through aria-describedby. The full definitions live on the How we verify page, one click away.
• Images and fonts: cover images are decorative and carry empty alt text; the title beside each one is its name. No text sits inside an image. Fonts are self-hosted with fallbacks. Light theme only.

We would rather name these than leave you to find them. Here is what is not fully met today.

• The tier tooltip is CSS only, so it cannot be dismissed with a key, which WCAG 1.4.13 asks for.
• Text sizes are set in pixels, so the browser's default text-size setting does not change them. Page zoom and pinch zoom do work.
• There has been no third-party audit, and no testing with assistive technology by its users is on record. The checks so far are the operator's own, against the design system's rules.

If something blocks you, use the error report page. Say which page and what happened. We treat fixes as bugs and make them as soon as practical.