Accessibility

This site has not been fully audited, so you won't find a conformance claim on this page.

Most accessibility statements open by promising WCAG 2.1 AA. We sell audits for a living, and we've written about why a cookie banner that offers a choice the site doesn't honor leaves a business worse off than no banner at all: the promise goes on the record and the behavior contradicts it. Publishing an unverified conformance claim here would be that same mistake, on our own house. What follows is the real state of it.

What we have actually tested

On July 31, 2026 we re-ran axe-core 4.12.1 against the WCAG 2.1 A and AA rule sets, in a desktop Chromium browser at 1280 pixels wide, on six pages:

• The home page
• Contact
• Contractors and trades
• Website Privacy Audit
• The LJM Construction case study
• The One Page That Books fit check

All six returned no automated violations. We also checked the footer's contrast by hand, compositing each translucent text color over the dark green behind it, because automated tools skip the pairs they cannot resolve. The tightest one measured 4.81:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement. It passes, with very little room.

Automated testing catches roughly a third of real accessibility problems. It is a floor, not a verdict, and six pages is not the site.

What we fixed

Case study statements were read twice. The large scroll-in lines on the three case study pages rendered every word twice, once faint and once animated, and hid neither from assistive technology. A screen reader announced "You You don't don't lose lose jobs jobs on on the the work." The words are now marked as decoration and the sentence is carried once, in order, by text only a screen reader sees.

Worth saying how close that came to shipping broken. The first fix used a label attribute that reads correctly to a person testing it and is prohibited by the accessibility spec on that kind of element. The tool caught it. We would not have.

A button was reachable but never announced. The animated console on the Website Privacy Audit page is hidden from screen readers on purpose, since it is a demonstration rather than a real consent banner. Its "Reject all cookies" button was still in the keyboard tab order, so someone tabbing through the page landed on a control their screen reader said nothing about. It now leaves the tab order along with the rest of the demo.

Multi-step forms said how far along you were, in a way you had to see. The fit checks and the project brief drew your position as a row of small brass marks and hid that row from assistive technology. Position is now also stated in words, so it is available whether or not you can see the marks.

What we got wrong

We published a contrast failure that was not real, and it sat here from July 26 to July 31.

This page said the brass "The free tool" label on the Website Privacy Audit page measured 2.81:1 and broke our own rule about brass on light surfaces. It does not. That label sits on the dark green band, where brass measures 5.63:1 against a 4.5:1 requirement. It passes and always did.

The 2.81:1 figure is real, but it is brass on cream, which is what a testing tool reports when it forcibly disables the animations and knocks the dark band out from under the text. We measured the wrong thing and wrote it down as a fault.

We are leaving this here rather than quietly deleting it. A page that only ever admits faults and never corrections is not being honest, it is performing.

What we have not checked at all

The gaps in the testing matter as much as the gaps in the site:

• No testing with a real screen reader. No VoiceOver, no NVDA, no JAWS. Everything above is what the markup says should be announced, not what a person heard.
• No full keyboard walkthrough. We confirmed focus styles exist in the stylesheet, not that every control shows a visible one.
• No zoom or reflow testing at 200 percent.
• No testing on a phone, and no touch targets measured.
• Nothing past the first step of the guided brief or the fit checks. We fixed the position indicator in both, and we have not walked either flow to the end.
• Twenty-four of the site's thirty page templates, including the blog, the city pages, and the free tools.

The standard we are working toward

WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That is a target and not a description of where this site is today. When we can say a page conforms because it was tested rather than because it was built carefully, this page will say so, page by page, with the date.

Telling us about a problem

Email hello@sealandco.studio. Tell us which page, what happened, and if you know them, your browser and any assistive technology you were using.

One person reads that inbox. You'll get a reply within two business days and a straight answer about whether we can fix it and roughly when. If something here is blocking you from reaching us or getting information you need, say that, and we'll get it to you another way while the fix waits its turn.

Last reviewed

July 31, 2026. We re-run this when something above changes, or in three months, whichever lands first.