Accessibility

What works, what doesn't yet, and how to tell us.

Last updated 21 September 2026

The short version: we're aiming at WCAG 2.2 Level AA. We're not there on every page yet. If something on Pawperator™ blocks you, email hello.pawperator@gmail.com with Accessibility in the subject and a person will read it — and if the fix is slow, we'll get you the information you were after by email in the meantime.

What we've done

One h1 per page and a semantic heading structure, so a screen reader can skim the page rather than read it end to end.
nav, main and footer landmarks, and a skip link to jump past the navigation.
Text alternatives on every image we ship.
Every dialog on the site is a real role="dialog" with an accessible name and a labeled close button.
Every form control has a label or an accessible name, including the search and filter controls that only showed placeholder text before.
No auto-playing audio or video, and no flashing content.
lang="en" declared, so screen readers use the right pronunciation.

What we know is still wrong

Listing these is more useful to you than claiming full conformance:

The map. Pin clusters are hard to reach by keyboard. Every listing on the map is also in the directory list, which is fully keyboard-accessible — use that view in the meantime.
User-uploaded photos. We can't guarantee alt text on images other people upload. We prompt for it; not everyone fills it in.
Third-party map tiles. The underlying OpenStreetMap imagery isn't ours and isn't described.
Color contrast. We've designed for it but haven't run a full audit against the 4.5:1 threshold, so we're not claiming it passes everywhere.
Focus handling in dialogs. Dialogs are announced correctly, but focus isn't yet trapped inside them — tabbing can wander into the page behind.

Standard we're measuring against

WCAG 2.2 Level AA. We treat it as the target for new work and fix older pages as we touch them. We haven't had a third-party audit.

Assistive technology we test with

VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, and keyboard-only navigation in Chrome, Safari and Firefox. If you use something we don't test with and it goes wrong, that's worth telling us — it's the kind of thing we'd otherwise never find.

Telling us about a barrier

Email hello.pawperator@gmail.com with Accessibility in the subject. Tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and what you use to browse. We aim to reply within five business days with either a fix or a date.