Accessibility

The standard we hold ourselves to

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, level AA. It is treated as a floor rather than a target: a change that breaks it does not get published, because the check runs as part of the build and a failure stops it.

What is checked on every build

These are automated tests that run before anything ships, not a review somebody did once:

• Every page is tested against WCAG 2.2 AA with axe, including colour contrast, form labelling, heading structure and landmark regions.
• Every interactive element is reached by keyboard and shows a visible focus indicator. This is checked by driving the site with a keyboard, not by reading the stylesheet.
• Components are tested in their open states. Tabs, dialogs, accordions and tooltips are operated by key and re-tested once open, which is where accessibility usually breaks and where a scan of the initial page never looks.
• Text contrast is measured, not eyeballed. Our brand orange is deliberately never used as text on a white background, because at that size it does not meet the contrast floor. It appears as a background behind dark text instead.
• Focus is never parked underneath something. We tab through every page and check, at five points on each control, whether anything is painted over it. A control hidden behind a sticky bar is still focused and completely invisible, which is the kind of thing only this test finds.
• Every control is big enough to hit, at least 24 by 24 pixels unless it is a link inside a sentence or has enough space around it that a finger cannot miss.
• The page works at 320 pixels wide, which is the same thing as zooming to 400%, with no sideways scrolling.
• Your own text spacing does not break it. If you override line height, letter spacing and word spacing in your browser, nothing is clipped or cut off.

The last four of those are requirements that were added in the most recent version of the guidelines, and no automated accessibility scanner tests them. We wrote our own check for them. It found thirty-one real problems on this site the first time we ran it, all of which are fixed, and it now runs on every build so they cannot come back.

Specific things we have built for

• Keyboard only. Everything on the site can be operated without a mouse, including the bridge configurator and the 3D viewer. A skip link is the first thing the Tab key reaches on every page.
• Reduced motion. If your system asks for reduced motion, the scroll animations do not run, the 3D model does not spin, and the viewer renders a still image rather than starting a canvas. The preference is checked before the animation code is downloaded, so it costs you nothing to have it on.
• Nothing is signalled by colour alone. Status is always an icon and a label as well as a colour.
• The 3D viewer has a text equivalent. Every configuration the model shows is also written out in the page, so nothing is knowable only by looking at a rotating object.
• Videos do not start themselves, and nothing autoplays anywhere on the site.
• Nothing needs a drag. The 3D viewer turns by dragging if you want it to, and every one of those movements is also a button.
• Form errors are attached to their fields so a screen reader reads the problem with the input rather than somewhere else on the page.
• Every photograph and diagram has a text description written by somebody who looked at it.

What has not been tested

Automated testing is good at finding broken markup and bad at telling you whether something is usable. Being straight about the difference:

• No human has used this site with a screen reader. The markup is correct as far as automated testing can determine and a full manual audit with VoiceOver and NVDA has not been done yet. It is planned.
• No formal VPAT or Section 508 conformance report exists. If your procurement process needs one, ask and we will start it rather than send you something we have not done.
• The 3D viewer is the hardest part of the site to use without sight. The text equivalent is there and we would like to know whether it is enough.

If something does not work

Tell us and we will fix it, and we would rather hear about it than not. Email sales@roadrunnerbridge.com or call 903-224-9262. It helps to know what page it was and what you were using, but tell us anyway if you would rather not go into it.

You never have to use this website to buy a bridge. Everything the configurator and the quote form do can be done over the phone with a person, and that is not a lesser route: the form is a way of collecting the same seven answers a salesperson would ask you for.