Accessibility
Haven is a learning platform. If someone cannot use it, they cannot learn on it. This page says what we aim at, what we have built, what is still broken, and how to tell us when we have got it wrong.
Our commitment
Haven is a learning platform. If someone cannot use it, they cannot learn on it. That makes accessibility part of the product rather than a compliance exercise.
This page is not a statement that Haven is accessible. It is a statement of what we are trying to do, what we have actually built, what we know is still wrong, and how to tell us when we have got it wrong.
- Perceivable — information and interface elements are presentable in ways people can perceive, including text alternatives and sufficient contrast.
- Operable — everything works by keyboard, nothing depends on a pointer, and nothing traps focus.
- Understandable — pages behave predictably, errors are explained in words, and instructions do not rely on shape, size or colour.
- Robust — markup is standard and semantic, so it keeps working across browsers and assistive technology.
The standard we work to, and what we do not claim
We work towards WCAG 2.1 Level AA as our technical target.
We have not completed a formal accessibility audit, so we do not claim to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA, or to any other level or version. When we have been independently assessed, we will say so here and publish the date and the result — including the parts we failed.
Haven is a business open to the public, and we treat the Americans with Disabilities Act as applying to what we build. We do not claim to be “ADA compliant”. Having accessibility features is not the same as being compliant, and no self-assessment establishes that.
What we have built
Haven is built on accessible foundations rather than retrofitted ones. These are things that exist in the product today, not intentions.
- A skip link at the top of every page, targeting the main content landmark that every layout defines.
- Semantic HTML — headings in order, real lists, real tables with captions and row and column headers, and named landmark regions.
- Keyboard navigation through every interactive element, with a visible focus ring that is never removed.
- Form fields with associated labels, and errors described in text rather than by colour alone.
- Dialogs that identify themselves to assistive technology and close on Escape.
- Horizontally scrollable tables that are reachable by keyboard, with an accessible name saying what they contain.
- Decorative icons hidden from assistive technology, so a glyph is not announced before the heading it sits beside.
- Responsive layouts that reflow on small screens and at high zoom.
- Server-rendered pages, generally more robust for assistive technology than content assembled in the browser.
What we know is not right yet
Being specific is more useful than being reassuring.
- No formal audit has been carried out. There will be issues we have not found.
- No screen reader testing with NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver has been completed.
- One known contrast failure. We measured these four policy pages against the WCAG 2.1 A and AA rules using axe-core on 12 September 2026. One failure remains: white text on Haven's primary accent colour measures 2.99:1, where 4.5:1 is required. It affects the main call-to-action button, which appears across the whole site, so fixing it is a change to Haven's palette rather than to this page.
- That measurement covers these four pages only. The rest of Haven has not been measured the same way, and an automated tool finds only part of what is wrong — it cannot tell whether a page makes sense when read aloud.
- Course content is created by teachers. We do not currently require image descriptions or check readability, so accessibility varies between courses.
- Video lessons do not support captions or transcripts. Video is part of Haven today, so this is a real gap rather than a future one.
- Live classes, when they launch, will depend on Zoom's own accessibility support for captioning.
- Some images may still lack meaningful alternative text.
- Automated accessibility checks are not part of our build pipeline yet, so the measurement above is a point-in-time check rather than a guard against regressions.
Report an accessibility barrier
Please tell us. Specific reports are worth more than general goodwill, and we would rather hear about a problem than have someone quietly give up.
Email support@havencourses.com. We do not have a separate accessibility inbox — this is the same address as general support, and it reaches a person either way.
The more of this you can include, the faster we can reproduce it. Send what you have; a partial report is much better than none.
| WHAT TO INCLUDE | WHY IT HELPS |
|---|---|
| The page or URL | So we look at the right screen. Pasting the address from your browser is ideal. |
| What you were trying to do | A barrier is specific to a task. “Enrolling in a course” tells us more than “the site”. |
| What happened instead | What you encountered, or what you could not reach. |
| Your browser and device | For example, Safari on an iPhone, or Chrome on Windows. |
| Your assistive technology | The name and version if you know it — VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS, Dragon, a switch device, browser zoom. |
| Steps to reproduce | What you did, in order, before it went wrong. This is the single most useful thing you can send. |
If Haven cannot support you yet
If something on Haven is not usable for you and we cannot fix it quickly, we will find another way to get you what you need rather than leave you waiting for a release.
If you need course material in a different format, email support@havencourses.com and we will work with the teacher to arrange it.
If you cannot complete a task — signing up, enrolling, reaching a lesson, contacting a teacher — tell us and a person at Haven will do it with you or for you.
How we keep this page honest
We review this page whenever we ship something that changes what it says, and at least every six months regardless.
The date at the top is the date of the last review, not the date of the last cosmetic edit. If the date is stale, the page may be too — tell us and we will check it.
Where this page previously claimed something Haven did not do, we have removed the claim and said so, rather than quietly deleting a sentence.