Accessibility

The Visual Thinking Company designs for everyone. This page sets out how the map can be read and operated, what has been measured, and what is not there yet.

Contrast, measured in both themes

Every text colour in the interface was measured on the built app in both themes, on the ground it is actually drawn on, using the WCAG relative-luminance formula. No pair fails its threshold. The tightest margin in the set is the accent colour in the light theme, at 5.68:1 against a 4.5:1 threshold.

Keyboard operation

Tab

moves through every control in the order the page is written in. The first stop is a link that hands focus to the map itself, which owns the arrow keys.

Arrow keys

pan the map, and the plus and minus keys zoom it, once the map has focus.

Slash

puts the caret in the search field from anywhere except a text field.

Escape

leaves whatever is open: the cover, an overlay page (the stories index, the palette, this page), the colour key, an area card, or story mode.

Enter and space

press whichever control has focus, and on the map itself select the area at the centre of the frame. Every story, every search result and every area in the list is a real button. The colour key is a reading rather than a set of controls: its rows are labels, and nothing is hidden behind them.

Screen readers

The page carries one polite live region. It announces the name of the area a reader has just selected and the title of the story that has just opened, because both of those are changes of state made on the map rather than in the document. It says one thing at a time and nothing at rest. The map itself is a labelled region, and the label says what the map shows and which keys move it.

Reduced motion

Motion in the interface is a fade, plus one short slide when a bottom sheet settles: no scale, no parallax. A reader whose system asks for reduced motion is given the destination instead of the move. The camera jumps to a story rather than easing to it, and the reading appears at once rather than fading in.

Colour vision

The palette is checked under protanopia, deuteranopia and tritanopia simulation, and related origins share a region of the palette rather than being scattered across it. That is a help, not a guarantee: the map holds lightness roughly level across the nineteen families so that hue carries family identity, which is exactly the property a colour-vision difference and a greyscale print both take away.

So colour is never asked to carry the reading on its own. Pointing at an area prints the origins reported in it, named and ranked with their shares; the place labels on the map name the most reported origin in words; and every story states its claim in a sentence with the figures in it. The colour is the pattern, and the pattern is always written down somewhere a reader can check it.

Known gaps

A reader using the keyboard can pan and zoom the map, select the area at the centre of the frame with Enter or space, reach every story and every search result, and open any area by its address. Stepping from one area to the next is what is still missing: there is no key that moves the selection to a neighbouring dissemination area, so reaching a particular area means bringing it to the centre of the frame first.