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Accessibility

How this site is built to be used.

We build accessible interfaces for clients, so it would be a poor advertisement if our own site were not one. Here is what is done, and what is still missing.

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The standard we hold this to

This site targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That is the same bar we build client work to, and the same one most public sector and procurement requirements name.

We are not claiming perfect conformance. A statement that claims it usually has not been tested, and the useful version of this page is the one that tells you where the edges are.

What is in place

Motion

This site animates a great deal, and every part of it stops if you ask. Nineteen separate modules branch on prefers-reduced-motion, including the scroll-driven sections, the carousels, the parallax and the page transitions. With reduced motion set, content is placed directly in its final state — never hidden behind an animation that has been switched off.

Colour and contrast

The accent colour exists in two values so it can carry the same weight on both grounds and still pass: 5.46:1 on the light ground and 8.06:1 on carbon, against the 4.5:1 that AA requires for body text. An earlier accent measured 4.15:1 and was replaced for that reason. Buttons darken rather than lighten on hover, because lightening would have dropped white label text to 2.47:1.

No information is carried by colour alone. Where colour marks something — a focused card, an active nav item — there is a second signal.

Keyboard

  • A skip link is the first tab stop on every page, so the navigation does not have to be walked through to reach content.
  • Focus is always visible. The outline is drawn in the accent colour on light grounds and white on dark ones, and it is never removed.
  • The industries carousel can be driven with arrow keys and with on-screen previous and next buttons. WCAG 2.2 requires a single-pointer alternative to any drag operation, so the buttons are the conforming path and the drag is the convenience.
  • Same-page links move focus and scroll with an offset that clears the fixed navigation, so a heading you jumped to is not sitting behind it.

Structure and semantics

  • One h1 per page, with headings in order beneath it.
  • Landmarks — banner, main, contentinfo — on every page.
  • Decorative artwork is marked aria-hidden so it is not announced. Split headings keep their full text as an accessible name, so a heading animated line by line is still read as one phrase.
  • Form fields have visible labels rather than placeholder text, errors appear next to the field they belong to, and status messages are announced through a live region.
  • The carousel announces its position through a live region as it moves, so its state is available without seeing it.

Reading and zoom

Text is set at 16px or larger with generous line height, layouts are fluid rather than fixed, and zoom is not disabled. Content reflows to 400% zoom without horizontal scrolling.

Known gaps

We have not yet run a full audit with screen readers across every page and browser combination. The specific things we know are outstanding:

  • No formal assistive technology testing. The site has been built to the standard and checked in a browser, but it has not been sat with by somebody using NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver end to end. Until it has, treat everything above as built-for rather than verified-with.
  • Scroll-driven sections are motion-heavy by design.Reduced motion turns them off completely, which is the right behaviour, but it does mean the reduced-motion experience is a genuinely different one rather than the same page moving less.
  • The pinned services gallery holds the page still while it scrolls sideways. That is deliberate, and it is a pattern some people find disorienting. It is disabled under reduced motion.

Tell us when we get it wrong

If something here is unusable, we want to know, and we would rather hear about it bluntly than not at all. Email contact@xtenzium.com with the page and what happened — what you were using is helpful but not required.

We will acknowledge within one working day and tell you what we are going to do about it. If it is a real barrier, fixing it goes ahead of whatever else is in the queue.