Accessibility statement for this website

This statement was last reviewed on 8 August 2026. It describes the prototype built for HHFT’s website redesign, not the current hhft.org.

We are aiming at WCAG 2.2 level AA on every page and in every state of every component, and we treat that as a floor rather than a target. We are not claiming we have reached it, because some of the checks that would establish it have not been run. What has been run and what has not is set out below, in that order, because the second list is the one that tells you how much to trust the first.

Automatically, on this build: axe-core 4.11 across 57 page templates at 390 px and 1280 px, plus 40 interactive and dark-mode states — 155 scans, no violations at any severity.

By hand, in a browser: a keyboard walk of every interactive component with the focused element read back after every Tab; a contrast check that samples rendered pixels rather than colour tokens, because text over a photograph is where contrast failures hide; a reflow check at 320 px and at 200% text size on every template; and a pass of the site with CSS switched off and with JavaScript switched off.

The most recent pass found twenty-three defects, seven of them serious or worse. Thirteen were fixed and re-verified; the remaining ten are written down with the fix and an owner. One of the serious ones was white text on a white background on the homepage, above the fold, at phone width — every automated colour check had passed it, because the text sits over a photograph and automated checks report that as “could not determine” rather than as a failure.

None of this is a plan. It is a list of things we have not done yet.

• Nobody has used this site with a screen reader. Not once. The two we would test with — NVDA with Firefox on Windows, and VoiceOver with Safari on iOS — need a Windows machine and an iPhone, and the prototype was built in an environment with neither. Everything we say about how a screen reader behaves here is read off the browser’s accessibility tree, which tells you what a screen reader could announce, not what it does announce, in what order, or how many times.
• There is one bug we specifically expect and specifically have not ruled out: VoiceOver on iOS reading a trail alert twice. It is a known failure mode when a live region carries both role="alert" and aria-live. We built the alert bar the way that is supposed to avoid it — two separate regions, one role each, and nothing announced on page load — and we have not put it in front of a device to check.
• The map’s lines and symbols have not been contrast-checked against the map’s own background. Every colour the site uses for text has been checked, in light and dark mode, against the surface it sits on. The map is different: a trail line sits on water, woodland and rock fills that change as you pan and zoom, and the dark-mode half of that check is unfinished. If a status colour on the map is hard for you to pick out, we have not proved otherwise.
• The PDFs have not been audited. There are several hundred, mostly environmental-review documents we did not write. We know most of them are untagged, which usually means a screen reader reads them as an unstructured wall or not at all. We have not opened them one at a time, so we cannot yet tell you which ones are readable and which are not.
• We have not watched anyone use the site who relies on the things we built. Every finding above comes from the people who built it and from software. Sessions with blind and low-vision participants, with people who navigate by keyboard or switch, and with people with cognitive disabilities are costed in our proposal and have not taken place. That layer is the one that finds what is technically conformant and useless in practice, and until it happens this statement is a description of our own work marking itself.
• Reduced motion is wired but not watched. The site honours the “reduce motion” setting in your operating system, and we have verified that in the code and in the computed styles — but not by filming the result on a device that has the setting switched on.

These will be re-checked and this section rewritten as each one is closed. If it still says “not tested” long after launch, that is a finding about us.

Naming these is more useful than claiming they do not exist.

• Map labels do not grow when you increase your browser's text size. The map is drawn on a canvas, and text drawn into a canvas is not text as far as your browser's zoom is concerned. Three things reduce the harm: a “larger map labels” preference that persists; every label's content is also in the list view, which is real text and does scale; and the printable version contains real text.
• The map cannot convey spatial relationships to a screen-reader user, and we do not claim it does. What it conveys is sequence, distance and attributes — the things a trail planner actually needs. The list view is the primary representation on small screens and is not a lesser version.
• Spanish content on this prototype is machine-translated and labelled as such on every page. It has not been reviewed by a human translator. Do not rely on it for safety-critical information.
• Some archived documents are PDFs that are not tagged for accessibility. They are historic records we did not author. High-value documents are being converted to HTML; full remediation of the several-hundred-document environmental-review archive is a substantial separate piece of work and we are not going to imply it is done.

• That an accessibility overlay solves anything. We do not use one.
• Conformance for third-party embeds we do not control.
• That “accessible” is a single boolean covering every reader of this page.

If something on this site is unusable for you, email info@hhft.org and say what you were trying to do and what happened. That is more useful to us than a conformance report, and it gets a reply.

Accessibility information about the trail — as opposed to this website — is at Visit › Accessibility, and every segment page carries its own report-a-problem route to the person responsible for that record.