Publishing our gaps before our audit

What an accessibility page usually says

Most accessibility statements are written to be quoted in a procurement questionnaire. They name a standard, imply conformance without asserting it, list features in the present tense, and end with an email address nobody reads.

The problem with that genre is not that it is dishonest exactly. It is that it is unfalsifiable. A page that says a product is committed to accessibility cannot be wrong, which means it cannot be useful to the one person it is ostensibly for: somebody deciding whether they can actually use the thing.

So Haven's page is organised around a different question. Not what are we committed to, but what works, what does not, and how do you tell us when we are wrong.

What we do not claim

We work towards WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a technical target. We have not completed a formal 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 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.

An earlier version of that page cited Section 508. It applies to federal agencies and their contractors, and Haven is neither. We removed it and said why, rather than deleting the line quietly.

The list

These are the gaps we know about, published before anyone made us publish them.

No formal audit has been carried out, so there will be issues we have not found. No screen reader testing with NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver has been completed — that is a specific piece of work nobody has done, not a caveat.

There is one measured contrast failure. We checked four policy pages against the WCAG 2.1 A and AA rules with axe-core in September. 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 entire site, so fixing it is a change to Haven's palette rather than a change to a page. It is the most visible thing on this list and the slowest to fix honestly.

That measurement covers four pages. The rest of Haven has not been measured the same way, and an automated tool finds only part of what is wrong in any case — it cannot tell whether a page makes sense read aloud.

Video lessons do not support captions or transcripts. Video is part of Haven today, so that is a present gap rather than a future one. Course content is written by teachers and we do not currently require image descriptions or check readability, so accessibility varies between courses. Some images may still lack meaningful alternative text. Automated accessibility checks are not yet part of the build, so the measurement above is a point-in-time check rather than a guard against regressions.

Why publish a list you have not finished

Because the alternative is a page that becomes true only after the work is done, and in the meantime says nothing.

There is also a practical effect we did not anticipate. A written gap is harder to leave alone than a known one. The contrast failure has a number attached to it and a sentence explaining that it needs a palette change, and that is a materially different thing to carry around than a vague sense that the buttons might be a bit light.

The page had its own errors, which is the part worth admitting. An earlier version listed a missing skip link that had in fact been built, and said video lessons were not part of Haven when they were — without captions, which was the actual problem. Both were corrected, and the corrections are noted on the page rather than silently applied.

If Haven does not work for you

Email support and a person will answer within three to five days. There is no separate accessibility inbox — it is the same address as everything else, which is deliberate, because a specialist queue nobody staffs is worse than a general one somebody reads.

If something is not usable 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 cannot complete a task — signing up, enrolling, reaching a lesson, contacting a teacher — tell us and somebody at Haven will do it with you or for you.

A specific report is worth far more than general goodwill. What page, what you were trying to do, what happened instead, and what you were using to do it.