Accessibility

Our commitment

Bird Swatch is committed to providing an accessible digital archive. We want the specimens, palettes and shop to be usable with a screen reader, a keyboard, a switch device, magnification or a touch screen, and without relying on color alone to understand anything.

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at Level AA. That is a target we work toward continuously; it is not a certification, and the site has not been independently audited.

What we have done

• A skip link, a single main landmark and labeled navigation regions on every page.
• A visible keyboard focus indicator on every interactive element, drawn in the archive's own charcoal rather than a browser default.
• Text alternatives for specimen photography, and a spoken description of each five-color palette.
• Named controls for icon-only buttons such as search, cart, menu, like and copy.
• Result counts, copy confirmations and form outcomes announced to assistive technology.
• Labeled, autocompleting form fields with errors described in text as well as position.
• Reduced motion for visitors whose system asks for it.
• Layouts that reflow to a narrow screen and remain usable at 200% zoom, with pinch zoom never disabled.

Known limitations

• Checkout payment fields are supplied by our payment provider, and their accessibility is outside our direct control.
• Some older specimen records still carry a generic image description while photography is recataloged.
• Color is intrinsic to the archive; where a palette is the subject, hexadecimal values are provided as the text alternative rather than a description of the color itself.
• Third-party retailer pages linked from the Field Shop are not covered by this statement.

Contact us

If you experience difficulty using the site or accessing any content, please contact us at hello@birdswatch.co and describe the page and the difficulty. We will respond and, where we can, provide the content in another form.