Statement

Accessibility

Last updated 23 September 2026

We want this site to be usable by everyone, including people using a screen reader, a keyboard alone, magnification, or a browser set to reduce motion. Here is exactly where we stand, including what we have not solved.

What we aim for

We target WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the standard referenced by the Americans with Disabilities Act and Section 508.

Conformance status

This site conforms to WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Conformance means we know of no failure of any Level A or Level AA success criterion. The claim covers the whole of hoodrubber.com — the story, the book, the audio guide, and the privacy, terms, accessibility and confirmation pages — in all nine language editions.

Last verified 23 September 2026, against the published site rather than a draft of it. We re-verify after any change to the site, and we will say so here when we do.

What we have done

• Every image carries alternative text describing what it shows, not merely what it is.
• The nine-stop audio guide has a full written transcript of every stop, readable without playing any audio. The transcript is translated into every language the site offers.
• The opening film is silent, plays muted, and has a visible pause control.
• All motion — the slow zooms on photographs, the drifting arrow, the film — stops if your system is set to reduce motion.
• Everything can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone, including the horizontally scrolling logo timeline, and the focus indicator is always visible.
• Text and interface colours meet or exceed the required contrast ratios, checked rather than eyeballed.
• The page reflows to 320 pixels wide without horizontal scrolling, and text can be enlarged to 200% without losing content.
• Headings, landmarks and page language are marked up properly, and the page language changes with the language you select, so a screen reader pronounces it correctly.
• A skip-to-content link is the first thing a keyboard user reaches.

How it was tested

On 23 September 2026 the published site was audited with axe-core against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 at levels A and AA. Seven page states were checked: the story, the book, the audio guide mid-playback, and the privacy, terms, accessibility and confirmation pages. The audit returned no violations in any of them.

Keyboard operation was then walked through by hand on the live page. The skip link is the first stop, every control in the tab order carries a visible focus indicator, the order follows the reading order, and focus is never trapped. Contrast ratios were calculated rather than estimated. Audits run during development were done the same way, and every violation they surfaced was fixed rather than suppressed.

We do not use an accessibility overlay or widget. Overlays do not make a site conformant, and we would rather repair the site than paper over it.

Known limitations

We would rather name these than let you discover them.

• Automated testing catches roughly a third of accessibility problems. The site has not yet been tested end to end by people using screen readers in their own setups. That testing is planned.
• The book viewer presents printed spreads as images. The caption for each spread describes it, but the small print reproduced within a page image is not available as machine-readable text.
• Some archival images are low-contrast scans of century-old printing. We have not altered them, because altering them would falsify them; the captions carry the information instead.
• The narration for the Hong Kong edition is spoken in Mandarin rather than Cantonese, because no Cantonese voice was available to us.
• The opening film’s description for screen readers is written in English in every edition. It is marked up as English, so a screen reader reading a Japanese or Korean page will switch voice and pronounce it correctly rather than mangle it, but it is not yet translated.

Tell us

If you hit a barrier anywhere on this site, please write to info@hoodrubber.com. Describe the page and what happened; we will reply within five working days and tell you what we intend to do about it. If something blocks you from reaching the information, we will send it to you another way in the meantime.

Compatibility

The site is built to work with current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on desktop and mobile, together with the screen readers those platforms ship with. It does not rely on any browser plugin.