Accessibility
Accessibility at Vampelium
We want everyone to be able to open an account, read what we publish and manage their own settings — with a screen reader, with a keyboard alone, at large text sizes, or with animation turned off. This page says where we actually are, not where we would like to sound.
Where we stand
We are aiming at AA. We are not claiming we have reached it.
Our target is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 at Level AA. That is the level we design and build to, and the level we measure ourselves against when we check our own work.
We are not claiming conformance with it. No independent accessibility audit of this site has been carried out — not by an external firm, not by a testing lab, not by anybody outside the team that wrote the code. Everything described below as verified was verified by us, by reading and using our own pages. That is useful, and it is not the same thing as being tested by the people who rely on these tools every day.
So this page is split three ways: what we have checked, what we are building towards but have not confirmed, and the problems we already know about and have not fixed yet.
- Target
- WCAG 2.2 Level AA The current version of the international standard, at the level most public bodies require.
- Conformance claim
- None We do not claim this site conforms. Parts of it almost certainly do not — some of those parts are listed further down.
- How it was assessed
- Internal review only Read through by the team who build the site, using a keyboard and a browser. No third-party audit, no formal report, no accessibility conformance document.
- Assistive technology testing
- Not yet done We have not completed a structured pass with screen readers, voice control or switch access. Until we have, we will not claim those experiences work.
Checked by us
What we have built and confirmed ourselves.
Each of these is in the site today. We have confirmed them by going through the pages ourselves with a keyboard and a browser — not by running a screen-reader test suite.
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A skip link, first thing on the page
Press Tab as soon as the home page loads and the first thing you get is “Skip to content”. It appears in the top-left corner rather than staying invisible, and it jumps you past the navigation bar straight into the main content.
Home page, this page and the status page -
A visible focus outline that follows the keyboard
Every link and button you can reach with Tab draws a two-pixel pink outline, set three pixels away from the control so it is not swallowed by the edge of a button. It appears for keyboard use and not for mouse clicks, so it never looks like a stray highlight.
Home page, this page and the status page. Not yet on the account screens — see issue 02 -
Proper page structure, not a pile of boxes
Each page uses real landmarks — a banner at the top, a navigation region that announces itself as “Primary”, one main content region and a footer — so a screen reader can jump between them instead of reading everything from the top. Headings run in order, and lists are marked up as lists even where we have removed the bullets.
All pages -
If you have asked your device to reduce motion, we listen
Turn on “reduce motion” in your operating system and the site stops moving: the slow pink glow behind the header freezes, sections stop fading in as you scroll, hover animations are removed and jumping to a link no longer scrolls smoothly. This works on the marketing pages and on the account screens.
All pages -
Colour contrast is calculated, not eyeballed
Text colours are chosen by measuring the contrast ratio against the background rather than by looking at them. Body text sits at about 12:1, quieter secondary text at about 6:1, and the faintest small print at about 4.8:1 — all above the 4.5:1 that AA asks for. Buttons use a deeper pink than the brand pink, because white text on the bright pink measures 3.5:1 and would fail. Input borders and other control edges are held above 3:1 so you can see where a box starts and ends.
All pages -
Every form field has a real, visible label
On sign-up, sign-in, verification and your account page, each box has a label above it that is properly connected to it — so a screen reader announces it, and clicking the label puts the cursor in the field. There are no fields whose only label is placeholder text that vanishes when you type.
Sign-up, sign-in, email verification, account -
Signing in does not become a memory test
Password fields are marked so that password managers and your browser’s saved passwords fill them in properly, and there is no puzzle, no image test and no “type these distorted letters” step anywhere in sign-up or sign-in. Nothing asks you to remember or transcribe something to prove you are a person.
Sign-up, sign-in -
The email code box is set up to fill itself in
The six-digit verification field is marked as a one-time code, so on a phone the code your email or messages app receives is offered above the keyboard and you can tap it in rather than copying digits across. It also asks for a number keypad instead of a full keyboard, and if you paste a code with spaces or dashes in it we clean it up rather than rejecting it.
Email verification -
Errors are announced, not just coloured in
When a sign-in or sign-up attempt fails, the message is placed in a region that screen readers read out as it appears, so you are not left waiting on a change you cannot see. The message is also written in words rather than shown as a red edge or an icon on its own. There is a real problem with how these messages are wired up, though — see issues 03 and 04.
Sign-up, sign-in, email verification, account -
The mobile menu behaves like a proper dialog
On the home page, opening the menu on a small screen moves focus into it, keeps Tab inside it rather than letting you wander invisibly behind it, closes on Escape, and returns focus to the button you opened it with. The rest of the page is made inert while it is open, so nothing behind it can be reached by accident.
Home page, narrow screens -
Decoration is hidden from screen readers
The glow behind the header, the faint grid, the outlined “VAMPELIUM” wordmark at the bottom of the page and the shield logo are all marked as decorative, so they are skipped rather than read out as meaningless graphics. The two social links carry proper labels — “Vampelium on X” and “Vampelium on LinkedIn” — instead of announcing as unlabelled links.
All pages -
Jumping to a section does not hide it under the bar
The header stays fixed at the top of the home page. Links that jump to a section leave a gap for it, so the heading you asked for lands below the bar instead of underneath it. The bar itself grows rather than clipping its own text when you zoom in.
Home page -
Nothing flashes, blinks or plays on its own
There is no video, no audio, no carousel that advances by itself and nothing that flashes. The only movement anywhere on the site is a very slow drift in the background glow and a gentle fade as sections come into view — and both stop if you have asked for reduced motion.
All pages -
Windows High Contrast mode is handled on the public pages
If you use the high contrast setting in Windows, the marketing pages redraw their borders and buttons in your chosen colours instead of forcing our pink through. This is not yet done on the account screens — see issue 06.
Home page, this page and the status page -
The page language is declared
Every page states that it is in English, so a screen reader reads it with the right voice and pronunciation rather than guessing from the browser’s own settings.
All pages
Not yet confirmed
What we are aiming for but have not verified.
These are things we have designed for and believe are broadly working. We have not tested them properly, so we are not going to tell you they are done.
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Screen reader experience end to end
We have not sat down with NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver or TalkBack and worked through creating an account, verifying an email and signing back in. Until we have, we cannot tell you what that journey sounds like. It is the single biggest gap between what we have checked and what actually matters.
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Zooming to 400%
The layout is fluid and collapses to a single column on narrow screens, which is the same mechanism that carries a page through heavy zoom. We have not run a formal pass at 400% zoom to confirm that nothing is cut off, overlapped or pushed sideways at that size.
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Voice control and switch access
Controls are ordinary buttons and links with visible text, which is what voice control needs in order to let you say their name. We have not tested with Voice Control, Voice Access or a switch device.
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Your own text size and spacing settings
Text is sized in relative units so it should grow when you increase text size rather than staying fixed. We have not verified what happens when you also override line height, letter spacing and word spacing, which AA requires us to survive.
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Plain language throughout
We try to write in ordinary words and explain what a thing does rather than what it is called internally. We have not run readability testing, and some of our security and privacy wording is still heavier than it needs to be.
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Email we send you
This statement covers the website. The verification email and any other mail we send have not been reviewed for accessibility at all.
Known issues
Problems we already know about.
These came out of reading our own pages. They are real, they are not fixed yet, and we would rather you knew about them than discovered them yourself. Most of them are on the account screens, which were built before the rest of the site and have not caught up.
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A button inside a link on the account page
The “Verify your email” control on your account page is a button wrapped inside a link. That is two controls in the same place, and a screen reader may announce it twice or describe it in a way that does not match what pressing it does.
Who this affects: screen reader users on the account page.
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No focus outline of our own on the account screens
On sign-up, sign-in, verification and your account page, only the text boxes draw our pink focus outline. Buttons and links fall back to whatever outline your browser draws by default, which on a very dark background can be hard to make out. The rest of the site does this properly; these four pages do not.
Who this affects: anyone navigating those screens by keyboard.
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Error messages are marked two contradictory ways
The message area on those screens is marked both as an alert, which should interrupt, and as polite, which should wait for a pause. The two contradict each other and the polite setting wins, so an error that should have interrupted you may sit there until your screen reader finishes whatever it was saying.
Who this affects: screen reader users filling in any of our forms.
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An error does not tell you which box to fix
When something goes wrong, one message appears at the top of the card. The field that caused the problem is not marked as invalid, the message is not connected to it, and focus does not move. If you cannot see the layout you have to work backwards to find out which box to correct.
Who this affects: screen reader users, and anyone who finds long error hunts tiring.
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Help text under a field is not read with the field
On sign-up, the notes under Username and Password — “3–32 characters” and “at least 10 characters” — are visible on screen but are not attached to the box they describe. A screen reader may not read them when you land on the field, so you find out about the rule only after the form rejects you.
Who this affects: screen reader users creating an account.
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The account screens are missing pieces the rest of the site has
They have no skip link, and they do not respond to Windows High Contrast mode, so our colours are pushed through instead of yours. They also use small uppercase labels of roughly eleven pixels — legible, above the contrast threshold, but smaller and harder to read than they should be, and all-capitals is harder going for some readers.
Who this affects: high contrast users, and anyone reading small text.
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Your account page needs JavaScript to show anything
The account page fetches your details after it loads and shows “Loading…” until it has them. If scripting is blocked or a request fails, it stays on “Loading…” with no explanation and no alternative, because there is no fallback message on any of the account screens.
Who this affects: anyone on a restricted browser, a poor connection or a network that blocks scripts.
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“Resend code” goes quiet without saying why
After you ask for a new verification code, the resend button switches itself off for fifteen seconds to stop the same code being sent over and over. Nothing tells you it has done that, or when it will come back — it simply stops responding.
Who this affects: anyone verifying an email, particularly if you cannot see the button dim.
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The fixed bar can cover what you have just tabbed to
On the home page the header stays put at the top. Tabbing backwards up a long page can move focus to a link that has scrolled underneath it, so the outline you are meant to be following is partly hidden. WCAG 2.2 added a rule about exactly this, and we do not currently meet it.
Who this affects: keyboard users on the home page.
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Sections start invisible until you scroll to them
On the home page, sections fade in as they come into view. Until that happens the text is present but fully transparent, so using your browser’s find-on-page can take you to a match you cannot see for a moment. There is a safety timer that reveals everything after four seconds, and turning on reduced motion switches the effect off entirely — but the underlying behaviour is still wrong.
Who this affects: anyone using find-on-page, or following a link to a section deep in the page.
Settings we respect
Things you can change that we will follow.
Reduce motion. Turn this on in your operating system’s accessibility settings and every animation on this site stops, including the drifting glow, the fade-in sections and smooth scrolling. You do not need to tell us — the site reads the setting.
Text size and page zoom. Zoom with your browser or raise your system text size. The layout is fluid and reflows into a single column rather than forcing you to scroll sideways to read a line.
High contrast. On Windows, high contrast mode is respected on the public pages: our borders and buttons are redrawn in your colours. The account screens do not do this yet.
Keyboard only. Everything on the public pages can be reached with Tab and activated with Enter or Space. Start with the skip link, which is the first thing focused.
Printing. These pages have a print layout: black text on white, decoration removed, so a printed or PDF copy is readable rather than a wall of dark ink.
Tell us
If something here blocks you, we want to hear about it.
Reports from people who actually hit the problem are worth more than any checklist we run ourselves. If a page will not let you do something — you cannot reach a control, a message is never announced, a code box will not accept your input — please tell us, even if you are not sure it is our fault.
- How to reach us: support@vampemail.com
- What helps: the page you were on, what you were trying to do, what happened instead, and the browser and any assistive technology you were using. Any of it is better than none of it.
- Response process: delivery and monitoring are not yet verified, so this page makes no assurance that a report has been received. We are not going to promise a response time we have not built the capacity to meet.
Email support@vampemail.com about accessibility barriers. Delivery and response times have not yet been verified. No alternative phone channel is currently listed.
What happens next
The order we intend to work in.
No dates, because we have not committed to any and a date we invented would tell you nothing.
First, the account screens. They carry the parts of the site you cannot avoid — creating an account, signing in, verifying an email — and they hold most of the issues listed above. Fixing focus outlines, error handling and the nested button there removes the sharpest edges.
Then, a structured test pass with screen readers and keyboard-only navigation across the whole sign-up journey, so that “verified” on this page starts to mean tested rather than reviewed.
Then, an independent audit by people who do not work here, and this page updated to say what they found — including the parts we got wrong.
When any of that happens, this page changes. If it says the same thing in six months, that means nothing has happened, and you should read it that way.