Accessibility

Forklist should work if you use a screen reader, do not use a mouse, cannot tell things apart by colour, or find on-screen movement makes you ill. This page says how well it does.

Accessibility statement · last reviewed 6 November 2026

The commitment

Forklist aims to meet WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. Where it falls short, this page says so.

Who has tested it

I make Forklist on my own, in the evenings. There is no accessibility team, and nobody has yet sat down with this app and a screen reader and told me what it is like.

So I have checked everything below, but the people it is for have not tested it yet. When I checked every colour against its real background, twelve combinations that looked fine to me failed. All were changed.

What is here today

Seeing

• In the app, light or dark follows your device until you choose otherwise. Settings → Appearance has Light, Dark and other colour themes, and a System switch that goes back to following your device. The sign-in screen and the pages anyone can read, such as this one, are always light, whatever your device is set to, except Cookies and Terms, which are always dark.
• Contrast is measured. Every text colour in all twelve colour themes is checked against its background at the 4.5:1 ratio AA requires. The placeholder grey failed in every theme and was darkened.
• Colour is never the only signal. Pins are coloured by whose spot it is, and the icon inside shows the kind of place. If you cannot tell the colours apart, the icons and the list still tell you everything.
• The map is never the only way to do something. Every spot is also a row in the list next to it, with the same notes, votes and controls. To start on the list every time: Settings → Appearance → What Forklist opens on → All spots.
• Photos are buttons with names. Each one says where it sits and whose it is, like “Photo 2 of 9, your photo”, and opens the photo viewer. The line under them names Google’s photographers, each with a link.

Hearing

Forklist has no video, no voice notes and no autoplay, so nothing needs captions or a transcript. In the Android and iPhone apps, a notification plays your phone's usual notification sound, which you can turn off in your phone's settings for Forklist.

Keyboard, and not using a pointer

• The first Tab press offers to skip the header. A Skip to content link is the first item on every page, including the app. It appears when it has focus and jumps you to the main content.
• Tab reaches everything, and focus is always visible. It draws a two-pixel outline in the theme accent colour, offset so it does not overlap the element. In the front page's rows of tags, every tag in the focused row gets one.
• Escape closes whatever is open: any dialog, the settings page, the account menu.
• The tabs are real tabs. The Friends and Groups switch under Social and the sections in Settings are linked to the panels they control, so a screen reader can tell you which one you are on and how many there are.
• Nothing requires dragging. You can drag the panel shut on a phone, but the button in the dock below does the same thing.
• Every field has a label, not only placeholder text.

Motion, and how much is going on

• A Reduce motion switch in the app, at Settings → Appearance → Motion. It is separate from the system setting, for anyone who wants only this app to hold still.
• Forklist follows the system setting. If your device says reduce motion, every animation and transition stops, including hover effects and chevrons.
• Loading placeholders don't shimmer.
• Two things on the front page move by themselves. The city at the top, which the sign-in page repeats, lights its windows and drops pins on a loop. The rows of tags under “The stuff you’d text a friend.” drift sideways, and resting the pointer on them, or moving keyboard focus into them, holds them. Your device's Reduce motion setting stops both: the city holds still, and each row of tags stays put until you swipe it.
• Year in Food's story moves on by itself, every seven seconds, when you open it with a tap or a click. Open it, or turn a page, from the keyboard and it waits for you. The Pause button at the top, pressed while it waits, stops it or starts it again until you close the story. Holding a page, resting the pointer on it or focusing one of its buttons holds it too, and with Reduce motion on it never moves on alone. Arrow keys and the Previous and Next buttons turn the pages.
• No endless feed. Activity shows your most recent updates and then stops. It never loads more as you scroll.
• Banners go away on their own. A notification that arrives while Forklist is open can show as a banner at the top of the screen, over what you are reading: in the apps any notification, and on the website a meet request or its answer. Forklist's own banner goes after eight seconds, or sooner with its Dismiss button.
• Chats use a fixed set of phrases you pick from a list, so you never have to find the words.

What is not done yet

• Your browser's default font size still does nothing. Type is set in pixels. Text size is under Settings, then Appearance, with Standard, Large and Largest. Browser zoom works on a computer, and on a phone the website pinch-zooms. The Android and iPhone apps do not, so Text size is how you make them bigger. The map keeps its own scale so pins stay where they are.
• The map is Google's. Its keyboard behaviour, contrast and labels are theirs, and I cannot change them. The list next to it does everything the map does.
• Windows High Contrast mode has not been tested. If you use it, I would like to know what happens.
• There is no formal audit and no VPAT. If you need one for a procurement process, I do not have it.

What you need to run it

Forklist runs in your browser, so it works with whatever your browser and assistive technology support. It is built to current web standards, not to any particular screen reader. In practice you need:

• A browser from the last couple of years. Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge, kept up to date. The Android and iPhone apps are the same app in a native wrapper, so this page applies to all three.
• Whatever assistive technology you already use. Nothing requires a specific screen reader, magnifier or switch, and nothing detects which one you have.
• No minimum version is listed, because I have not tested any version.

What other people write

Most of what is on the map was written by other people, and I cannot guarantee that part. A note is up to 500 characters of plain text, and nothing stops it being hard to read.

The app controls the structure around it. Chat messages and tags come from fixed lists, so conversations are always readable and filtering never depends on someone's spelling. Photos on a place have no description of what they show.

Consultation

There has been no consultation. Nothing in this app has been reviewed by a disabled person, an accessibility specialist, or anyone but me.

That is the biggest gap. If you use a screen reader, a switch, voice control or a magnifier and could spend twenty minutes telling me what this app is like, please get in touch.

Reporting a problem

If something does not work for you, tell me what you were using, what you expected, and what happened instead. A line like "The Friends tab announces nothing" is enough.

How to reach me

• Signed in: Settings → Support. It sends a message to a person, with your name and email attached, and the answer arrives in Forklist, under Notifications.
• Not signed in: email socials@forklist.me. A person reads that too, and it needs no account. The support page explains what to include.

What happens then

• A person reads it. You get no ticket number and no automatic reply. Privacy says who can read support messages.
• I aim to reply within a week, but I can't promise it.
• Anything that stops you using the app goes to the front of the queue, ahead of new features. Cosmetic issues may wait, and I will tell you if so.
• Each fix goes in the log below, with its date.

What has changed

The log starts on the day the work started, and nothing in it is backdated.

6 November 2026

• Contrast is now measured in all twelve colour themes. Matcha, a new free colour, is held to the same 4.5:1 minimum.

4 November 2026

• Contrast is now measured in all eleven colour themes, up from eight. Ice cream, Apple pie and Gochujang, the three new Plus colours, are held to the same 4.5:1 minimum.
• Reworded parts of this page more plainly. The commitment, who has tested it and who is responsible say the same things in fewer words. The motion list gives banners their own line, and says Activity never loads more as you scroll.

31 October 2026

• The list of motion no longer calls Year in Food's story the one thing that moves on by itself. It names the city and the rows of tags on the front page, says resting the pointer on the tags or moving keyboard focus into them holds them, and says your device's Reduce motion setting stops both.
• The Seeing list no longer says light or dark follows your device everywhere. In the app it does. The sign-in screen and the pages anyone can read are now always light, and Cookies and Terms always dark, whatever your device is set to.
• The focus outline on the front page's rows of tags was drawn under the moving tags and mostly hidden. Every tag in the focused row now gets its own, and the Keyboard list says so.

26 October 2026

• Added Year in Food's story, which moves on by itself every seven seconds, and the Pause button that stops it. The list of motion no longer says there is no autoplay.
• Text size now reaches the story.
• Opened or turned from the keyboard, the story waits for you.

25 October 2026

• Corrected four things this page got wrong. In the Android and iPhone apps a notification plays your phone's notification sound. A notification that arrives while Forklist is open can show as a banner over what you are reading. Photos on a place have no description. And the page no longer says Forklist has no moderation, since you can report a note or a person.
• Reworded the rest of this page more plainly, and cut lines that repeated others.

19 October 2026

• This page says a person reads each report, and links to the privacy page for who can read support messages.

17 October 2026

• This page names the iPhone app, which shows the same screens as the website and the Android app.
• The website pinch-zooms on a phone now. The Android and iPhone apps still do not, and a pinch on the map zooms the map.

4 October 2026

• Photos on a place are buttons now. Each says where it sits in the set and whose it is, and the line under them names Google’s photographers, each with a link to their profile.
• Google’s rating on a place reads as one sentence, “Google Maps rating 4.6 from 1,234 reviews”. Your friends’ stars read once, as the words beside them.

13 September 2026

• A refusal is a dialog now, not a strip at the foot of the screen. It is an alertdialog in the middle of the page over a dimmed backdrop, focus moves to its OK button and returns to where it was, Escape and the back gesture both close it, and where the app can fix the problem for you it offers that as a second button (Open settings, Try again). Confirmations stay as short notices, above the bar at the bottom rather than behind it.
• A location failure says which failure it was: switched off on the phone, not allowed for Forklist, or no fix in time. It used to say the same sentence about a browser for all three.
• Home opens with one card under the greeting instead of three. It is a labelled region with its own heading, its rows are buttons, and its one header action says where it goes (See all, Meet halfway).
• The Activity screen has two tabs, Friends and Inbox, built as a tab list with aria-selected on the current one. Each feed card carries Want to try as a toggle button with aria-pressed, and Jump to map.
• Forks has no tabs now. It opens on your lists, each one a button that says its name and how many places are on it, and All places is gone because Explore's list already shows them. Its Activity tab moved to the Activity screen. A place on a list opens its own page, and the link back at the top of that page names the list it came from.
• A list can be shown on the map. The map then carries a chip naming the list, with a remove button labelled for it; on a phone, where that bar is not drawn, the same name and a Show everything button sit at the top of the list.
• On a phone the search box is off screen until you press Add a spot on the bar at the bottom, which shows it and moves focus into it. On a desktop nothing changed.

4 September 2026

• Put the Skip to content link back, on all eleven documents this time — the app and the dashboard as well as the reading pages. It had been taken out on 30 August and the removal was recorded below; leaving that entry as the last word would now be a record of something that is no longer true.
• Raised the settings rows and the map, list and Forks controls to a 16 px floor on a desktop and 14 px on a phone. Several of them sat at 13.5 px, which is small for text that is a sentence rather than a label.
• Fixed the vertical alignment of the tag pills. They were centred on the box rather than on the letters, so a word with a descender sat visibly high inside its outline.
• Dropped a paragraph from What is not done yet that said the same thing as the Consultation section below. It is still true and it is still on this page — it was said three times.

30 August 2026

• Fixed a rule with a trailing comma that made its whole selector list invalid, which meant prefers-reduced-motion: reduce was silently doing nothing on this page, or on Cookies, Privacy and Terms. Nothing looked broken unless you had asked for less motion, which is exactly who it failed.
• Fixed the active icon in Settings, which was painted the same gold as the tile behind it in dark mode: contrast measured 1.00:1. It reads at 7.51:1 now, in both themes.
• Padded the fixed header and footer on every reading page for the space a phone's notch and gesture bar take up, so the wordmark and the footer links no longer sit behind the clock or the home indicator inside the app.

14 August 2026

The first deliberate accessibility pass, and this page.

• Measured every text colour in all twelve theme-and-mode combinations against the surface behind it. Twelve failed at AA: the placeholder grey in every theme, which had been compared against the wrong background. All twelve were corrected.
• Added a skip link to every page, so the first Tab offers to jump past the masthead. It was removed again later that month and is back as of 4 September 2026; both entries stay so the record of what changed is complete.
• Finished the tab pattern. Ten controls announced themselves as tabs and then pointed at nothing, which tells a screen reader there is a relationship and declines to say what it is; they now name the panels they actually control.
• Gave five inputs a real accessible name instead of leaning on a placeholder, which disappears exactly when you start needing it.
• Gave the app a top-level heading. The whole application document had none, so a screen-reader user had nothing to land on.
• Hid decorative icons from the accessibility tree, so buttons announce their name rather than their name and an unlabelled graphic.
• Extended reduced-motion support to the marketing pages, which animated on hover and never asked, and made loading placeholders go flat instead of shimmering.

Who is responsible

I build Forklist, and its accessibility is my responsibility.