Accessibility

At the very foot of every page, beside the copyright line, there is a control labelled Accessibility — a small figure icon with the word spelled out next to it. That opens the panel. The same control sits in the floating bar at the top of every page, immediately after the search icon; up there it is the icon alone, with no visible word, though it is still named “Accessibility” for a screen reader or voice control. Both open the identical set of controls; there is no separate settings screen and nothing to sign in to.

Theme — Light, Dark or System

Three buttons. System follows whatever your device is set to and keeps following it, so a phone that turns dark in the evening turns this site dark with it. Choosing Light or Dark pins the palette and stops it following the device.

Reduced motion

Stops decorative animation, the parallax and scroll-driven effects on the longer pages, and the smooth-scrolling inertia. It is described in full under motion, because it works together with the setting on your own device rather than instead of it.

Larger text

Raises the site’s base text size by an eighth — from the usual sixteen pixels to eighteen. It is not a font-size-only change: every measurement on the site is expressed relative to that base, so spacing, buttons and headings grow in proportion and the layout reflows rather than breaking. It multiplies whatever text size your browser is already set to, so if you have raised that, this raises it again from there. Your browser’s own zoom works normally as well; nothing here prevents pinch-zoom on a phone.

High contrast

Darkens the faintest parts of the palette — the hairlines between rows, the grey used for captions, dates and other secondary text, and the placeholder text in form fields — and thickens the keyboard focus outline from two pixels to three, with more space around it. It works in both the light and the dark palette.

Every one of the four applies the instant you change it, with no reload and no page jump. They are remembered in this browser’s own storage: there is no account behind them, which means they do not follow you to another device or another browser, and if your browser blocks local storage — private browsing, or a managed device — they will hold for the visit and be forgotten afterwards. On every later page load your settings are applied by a small script that runs before the page is first drawn, so a reader who has chosen the dark palette does not get a flash of the light one on the way in.

Most operating systems have a “reduce motion” or “minimise animation” setting. This site reads it. If you have already turned it on you need do nothing here: the animation is reduced on arrival, and the smooth-scrolling library is not even downloaded, because inertia is precisely the motion being objected to and a gentler version of an unwanted effect is still the unwanted effect.

The Reduced motion switch in the accessibility panel is the second route to the same result, for a reader who wants it here and not everywhere. The two are combined by addition and never by subtraction: turning the site’s switch on adds reduction, and turning it off cannot take away the reduction your device asked for. There is no setting on this site that can make the site move more than your own device permits.

Because a signal that exists only as movement is a signal a reader with less motion never receives, anything the site would otherwise say by moving is also said statically. A row that flashes to show it is the one you just picked also gains a solid outline that stays. A switch reports its state three ways at once — the position of its knob, the word “On” or “Off” beside it, and the state announced to assistive technology. A loading placeholder keeps a plain tint when its shimmer is switched off.

• The skip link is the first thing you reach

  Press Tab once on any page and a Skip to content link appears in the top-left corner. It moves your focus — not merely the scroll position — into the main region of the page, past the whole navigation menu. Where a page carries a site-wide announcement, that is the first thing you land on.

• Controls are real controls

  Everything you can act on is a real button or a real link, so it is reachable by keyboard, operable with Enter or Space, and speakable by voice control. The order you tab through a page is the order the page is written in. Keyboard focus is drawn as a purple outline set slightly away from whatever holds it; inside a form field it is a purple ring around the field instead, which is the same signal in the shape the box needs.

• Panels and dialogues hand focus back

  A dialogue keeps focus inside itself while it is open, closes on Escape, and returns focus to whatever opened it. One that is about to delete something starts with Cancel already focused and refuses to close on a stray click outside, so no reflex press can destroy a record. The accessibility panel itself behaves the same way, except that it does not claim the rest of the page is inert, because it is not.

• Names, languages and new tabs are announced

  An icon-only control — search, the menu, the accessibility panel — carries a written name that a screen reader and a voice-control user both get, even where no text is on screen. A link that opens in a new tab says so as part of its name. The page declares its language as English; where a craft record carries its name in its own language, and an editor has recorded which language that is, that name is marked with it so it is not pronounced with English rules.

• The map has a written equivalent beside it

  In the craft archive the markers on the map are real buttons rather than shapes painted into a canvas, and each one is numbered to match a row in the list beside it. Everything the map shows — which crafts exist, where they are and in which region — is on the page as text, at the same number, whether or not the map itself can be used.

Colour is never the only carrier of meaning on this site. Every status, every warning and every “this is the one you chose” is a word and a symbol as well as a tint, so nothing is lost to colour blindness, to a monochrome screen or to a black-and-white print. The same rule is what makes the print edition safe to flatten to black ink: doing so removes decoration and never information.

Every image published through the Centre’s editing system carries a text description — the “alt text” a screen reader reads in place of the picture — and the attribute is always written, never left off. Where an editor has described the image, that description is what you hear. Where a picture is genuinely decorative, such as a texture or the wash behind a headline, it is explicitly marked as decorative so a screen reader passes over it rather than interrupting with a filename, which is what an image with no attribute at all would produce.

An image whose description has simply not been written yet is treated the same way as a decorative one, and passed over silently. That is the least bad of the available behaviours and it is still a gap, so it is not left to chance: the editing system runs a content-health report that counts every image with no description, names the files and takes the editor straight to them. Photography that ships with the site is credited and described on the photography credits page.

One more habit is worth naming because it changes what you can trust on a page: wherever a list has been cut short, capped or filtered, the page says so in words and gives the full number. A list that quietly stops looks exactly like a place with no records, and the two mean very different things when the subject is an archive.

Every page has a print edition. Printing from the dark palette gives dark text on white paper rather than white text on nothing, because the paper version fixes its own colours regardless of the theme you were reading in — and it comes out the same whether or not you tick your printer’s “background graphics” box.

• The header, the footer, the navigation, the skip link and the buttons are all removed: on paper they are either meaningless or a stamp across the first sheet.
• Links to other sites print their full web address after the link text, so a printed citation is still followable. Links to a point on the same page, and the ones inside navigation, deliberately do not — forty addresses nobody asked for is not a service.
• Sections that would normally fade in as you scroll to them are forced visible, so a long page prints whole rather than as one screenful followed by blank sheets. Rows that scroll sideways on screen wrap onto as many lines as they need, so nothing is cut off at the edge of the paper.
• Photographs are bounded so that none of them takes a sheet to itself, a heading is never left alone at the foot of a page, and a caption is never separated from the picture it belongs to.

There is one thing the print edition cannot do, and it is listed under limits we know about.

• A closed section does not print

  Where a page folds its content into expandable sections, a closed one is not on the page at all — it is removed rather than hidden — so no print rule can recover it. A printed sheet therefore shows the section you had open and no others. Open each section before printing, or print the sections you need one at a time.

• The craft map is a visual instrument

  The interactive map in the craft archive is drawn on a canvas and cannot be read aloud, and geography is genuinely part of what it communicates. Its markers are keyboard-reachable buttons and it has a numbered list beside it carrying the same records, and each craft has a page of its own with its region and location written out — but a reader who cannot use the map does lose the shape of the distribution. Where several crafts sit close together the map groups them behind one marker that says how many it covers, and it is the list, not the map, that gets you to each one individually.

• The archive’s filters need JavaScript

  With scripting switched off or blocked, the site is still readable: pages, listings and records are all delivered as complete text. What stops working is changing a view — the archive’s filters, the period slider and the accessibility panel itself all need scripting. If you rely on your device’s own reduce-motion setting, that is honoured without any scripting at all.

• Not every target is the same size

  The switches in the accessibility panel are deliberately built as full-width rows forty-four pixels tall, because a twenty-pixel switch is the last thing that should be hard to hit on the panel somebody opens because pointing is hard. Elsewhere the sizes are not uniform: some small icon-only buttons, such as the cross that closes a panel, are about thirty-two pixels square, which is smaller than a reader with a tremor needs. Every one of them can also be reached by keyboard, and a panel can always be closed with Escape instead.

• Only English is declared

  Pages declare their language as English. A craft’s name in its own language is marked with that language where an editor has recorded which one it is, but individual words and phrases elsewhere in the prose are not, so a screen reader will pronounce them with English rules.

• Your settings stay in this browser

  The four controls are remembered in this browser only. They do not travel to another device, another browser or a private window, and where storage is blocked they last for the visit and no longer. A setting your device or operating system provides — dark mode, reduce motion, a larger default text size — is read on every visit, so those are the ones worth setting if you would rather not set anything twice.