Accessibility

The point of this site is that its technical information can be used, on whatever you read it with. It has been built with that in mind and checked in the ways described here. It has not been audited against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, so it claims no conformance level.

How the site is made

Every page is ordinary HTML with one main heading and its sections in order. The header, navigation, main content and footer are marked as what they are, and the language is declared as British English. There is no JavaScript, so nothing depends on it.

Everything can be reached with the keyboard alone. Whatever has focus is shown by a solid black outline.

Text is black on a slightly softened white, a contrast of 19.6 to 1. Secondary text is dark grey, at 8.3 to 1. For comparison, the usual guideline minimum for body text is 4.5 to 1. Type sizes follow your browser’s text size setting.

Long technical pages keep one reading position. Headings, prose, tables and entries all start from the same left edge, so you do not have to find your place again when the material changes form.

Nothing relies on colour alone. Links in running text are underlined. The marks in a Bench Note that show where a statement comes from are letters in a frame, not colours. Red is used only for a small index mark, which is also a shape in a fixed position.

One thing moves: the frame counter on the home page. It keeps still if your device asks for reduced motion.

Small screens

Pages were measured at widths of 1280, 390 and 320 pixels, and none scrolls sideways. At phone width the large tables in the Bench Notes are set out as entries, one row to an entry, and are still marked up as tables for software that reads them aloud. At 320 pixels one table in each note is too wide and scrolls inside its own box.

Drawings

The site has two drawings. The name in the header is labelled “SpeyBench, home”. The frame counter has a description in words. The Bench Notes published so far contain no diagrams. When diagrams are added, each will carry a description in words.

Bench Notes as PDF

Each Bench Note is published as a web page and as a PDF with the same content. The PDF is made for printing and for the bench. Its text is real text and it carries a title, but it is not tagged for screen readers and has no bookmarks. If you use assistive technology, the web page is the edition to use.

Known limitations

The site has not been tested with a screen reader. That is the largest gap, because the structure described above is only as good as it sounds when read aloud.

There is no “skip to content” link. Three links come before the content on every page.

The site has one appearance. There is no dark version, and it has not been checked in a high-contrast mode.

The PDFs are as described above.

Reporting a problem

If something here is hard or impossible to use, write to service@speybench.com and say which page and what you were using to read it. If you need a Bench Note in another form, ask.