Accessibility

What we are aiming at

We build to WCAG 2.2 level AA. That is a target we work to rather than a certificate we hold, and the gaps below are the honest distance between the two.

What the site does

Keyboard

• Everything you can do with a mouse can be done with a keyboard. There are no mouse-only controls, no hover-only menus, and no keyboard traps.
• A skip link is the first thing you reach with the Tab key on every page, and it jumps straight to the main content past the header.
• Focus is always visible. Every button, link, input and filter has a focus state you can see against the background, and we never remove an outline without replacing it.
• The tab order follows the reading order of the page, because the layout is built with CSS grid rather than by reordering the markup.

Screen readers and structure

• One h1 per page, then headings in order underneath it, so the heading list is a usable table of contents.
• Landmarks for the header, navigation, main content and footer, and a breadcrumb trail marked up as a navigation list on every page below the top level.
• Every control has an accessible name. Icon-only buttons carry a label describing what they do, not what they look like.
• Product images have descriptive alt text. Images that repeat information already in the text are marked as decorative so they are not read out twice.
• Changes that happen without a page load, such as a basket update or a form error, are announced rather than left silent.

Forms

• Labels sit above the field, always visible. A placeholder is never used as a label, so nothing disappears the moment you start typing.
• Help text sits under the field and errors under that, tied to the input so a screen reader reads them together.
• Errors say what to do, not just that something is wrong, and the field is marked invalid as well as coloured.

Colour and contrast

• Body text is dark ink on white and clears AA comfortably. Secondary and small print colours are chosen to clear 4.5 to 1 as well.
• The brand rose reaches only 3.36 to 1 against white, so it is used for decoration and never carries small text. Anything with a label on it uses the deeper rose at 5.02 to 1, and the pressed state is darker still.
• Colour is never the only signal. Status is carried by a word as well as a colour, and errors carry an icon and a message.
• The theme is light only. There is no dark mode, so nothing shifts underneath you if your system switches at sunset.

Motion and zoom

• Animation is small and short, and every animated element honours the reduce motion setting in your operating system. With it on, content appears rather than moves.
• Nothing moves, blinks or auto-plays on its own. There are no carousels that advance without you.
• Text can be resized to 200 per cent and the layout reflows to a single column rather than clipping. The page never scrolls sideways.
• Touch targets are at least 44 by 44 pixels on the controls you use most, including quantity steppers and filter chips.

What we know is not right yet

Listing these is more useful to you than claiming they do not exist.

• No independent audit has been done, and testing so far has been with VoiceOver on macOS and iOS. NVDA and JAWS have not been used properly yet.
• The product image gallery is operable by keyboard but announces image changes less clearly than it should.
• Some product descriptions written early on use colour names alone to distinguish variants, which is not enough on its own.
• A few of the older catalogue photographs have thin alt text that describes the object but not what is happening in the shot.
• No transcripts exist for video, because there is no video yet. When there is, it will have captions from the day it goes up.

Tell us when something blocks you

If any part of the site stops you doing something, we want to hear, and we will treat it as a fault rather than a suggestion. Send us a message with the page and what happened. We answer within two working days and will tell you what we are going to do and when.

If you cannot use the site to order, tell us what you want and we will take the order another way rather than leaving you stuck with a form that does not work for you.

Scope of this statement

It covers the amalyashop storefront. It does not cover our payment provider’s checkout, the courier tracking pages we link to, or content hosted elsewhere, each of which publishes its own statement. amalyashop Ltd is a private company, so this is not a statement made under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. We publish it because it is useful, not because we have to.