Accessibility

Frontiva aims to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. This page says what we actually test, what testing has found, and what we have not done. Like our security page, it is written to under-claim rather than over-claim: an accessibility statement that promises conformance nobody has verified is worse than one that is honest about its gaps.

What runs on every change

Three automated checks run in continuous integration and fail the build rather than producing a warning somebody reads later:

• axe-core over our component library in both light and dark themes, and over six page templates on this site.
• Colour contrast on every colour pair in the design system, checked against the WCAG AA thresholds, in both themes.
• A class-merge check, which exists because a styling bug once removed a colour before it reached the element. The contrast check passed happily while buttons rendered dark text on a dark background, because the tokens were never the problem.

Every screen in the product is also opened by a real browser on every change and checked for a single, named page heading, because a screen with no heading or two competing ones is the most common reason somebody using a screen reader cannot work out where they are.

What testing has actually found

Worth listing, because it is the evidence that the checks do something:

• A loading button with no accessible name at all. It used a technique that hides an element visually and also removes it from the accessibility tree, so the button announced nothing.
• A code block that no keyboard could scroll.
• Tab controls pointing at panels that were never rendered.
• Usage bars on the billing screen that announced themselves as an unnamed progress bar at zero. The label was being composed correctly and silently dropped by the component. This one is instructive: our automated pass over the component library did not catch it, because the library was being used correctly there. A check over a component library proves the library can be used correctly, not that it is being used correctly.

What we have not done

No audit by a person who uses a screen reader daily. This is the honest headline of this page. Automated tools catch roughly a third of what matters and none of what is merely confusing: a form that technically has labels and is still impossible to complete, a table that announces every cell without its heading, a flow that works and takes forty keystrokes. Our inbox and booking flows have never been driven end to end by somebody who relies on assistive technology, and until they have, we will not claim conformance.

No VPAT or formal conformance report. We would rather publish one after the audit above than before it.

Limited testing on assistive technology combinations. Our automated testing drives one browser engine. We have not systematically tested JAWS, NVDA or VoiceOver against each of the browsers people pair them with.

Known areas to approach with care

• Data-dense screens. The analytics screens and the pipeline board carry a lot of information in a small space. They pass automated checks; we expect them to be the hardest to use with a screen reader and they are first on the list for the audit.
• Charts. Every chart on this product is accompanied by the same numbers as text, because a chart alone is not an accessible way to present a figure. If you find one that is not, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

Telling us about a problem

If any part of Frontiva or this website is difficult or impossible for you to use, email info@frontivatech.com with the page or screen, what you were trying to do, and the assistive technology you were using if that is relevant. A description of what happened is enough; you do not need to diagnose it.

We treat accessibility reports as defects rather than requests, which means they go into the same queue as anything else that stops somebody using the product. We will acknowledge your message and tell you what we find, including when the answer is that we cannot fix it quickly.

If you need something now

If an accessibility barrier is stopping you completing something urgent, say so in that email and we will do it with you rather than leaving you waiting for a fix. That is not a substitute for the product working, and it should not be needed. It is what we can offer in the meantime.