Built to be used by everyone

Artefakt Preserve conforms to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That is a specific, testable standard rather than a general intention, and the sections below say how we hold ourselves to it. It covers the public archive, author pages, licensing and checkout, and the Studio that authors work in.

EVERYTHING WORKS WITHOUT A MOUSE

Every interactive element can be reached and operated from the keyboard alone — links, buttons, forms, menus, dialogs, image lightboxes, uploads, and the collection organisers. Tab moves forward, Shift+Tab moves back, Enter or Space activates, and Escape closes anything that opened.

Focus is always visible. Dialogs keep focus inside themselves while open and return it to whatever opened them when they close, so you do not lose your place — which matters most deep inside a long archive, where losing focus means starting the scroll again.

IT READS CORRECTLY ALOUD

Pages are built from real headings, landmarks, lists and form labels rather than styled containers, so a screen reader can navigate them structurally. Every control has an accessible name, every form field is programmatically tied to its visible label, dialogs announce themselves and carry a title, and photographs carry alternative text drawn from their captions and titles.

Tested with VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, and with NVDA on Windows.

IT STAYS READABLE

All body text meets or exceeds the 4.5:1 contrast ratio WCAG AA requires, and interface boundaries and focus indicators meet 3:1. These are not spot-checked. The palette is a small set of design tokens, and a guard recomputes the contrast of every text-and-surface pairing — in every theme, including the palettes authors can choose for their own public pages — on every deploy. If any pair falls below the threshold, the build fails.

There is also a text-size control, and no interface text is smaller than 13px.

HOW THIS IS KEPT TRUE

Accessibility regressions are ordinary bugs: easy to introduce, and invisible unless something is watching. Checks run before any change reaches this site, and each blocks the release rather than filing a warning nobody reads:

• the full jsx-a11y rule set at zero tolerance, across every page and component;
• a WCAG contrast guard that parses the stylesheet and verifies its own arithmetic against published reference values before trusting any result;
• a readability floor on interface text;
• end-to-end tests that drive the real site by keyboard.

WHAT IS STILL IMPERFECT

An honest statement has this section. We know about the following and are working on them:

• Reordering photos or collections by drag-and-drop. In the Image Manager, dragging a photo into a collection or press-and-hold to reorder a collection are mouse-only gestures with no keyboard equivalent yet. Every other action on that screen — selecting, opening, rating, flagging, captioning, renaming, deleting, resizing panels — is fully keyboard-operable.
• Video captions. Transcripts are generated automatically and attached to the main player, but several secondary players do not yet display a caption track.
• Older archive images. Some photographs published before 2026 have brief alternative text. Newly published work carries full descriptions.

TELL US IF SOMETHING BLOCKS YOU

If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, we want to hear about it — including things not listed above. Tell us the page and what happened, and we will fix it and reply.

Write to jon@artefakt.foundation or use the contact form. Accessibility reports are treated as priority bugs, not feature requests.