Accessibility

Forklist should work if you use a screen reader, if you never touch a mouse, if colour is not how you tell things apart, or if things moving on a screen make you ill. Here is exactly where that stands.

Accessibility statement · last reviewed 14 August 2026

The commitment

Forklist should be usable by everyone it is for, and being small is not a reason to skip that. Accessibility is treated here as part of whether a feature is finished, not as a pass done afterwards — a screen that cannot be reached from a keyboard is not a screen that is ready. Where the app falls short of that, this page says so by name rather than leaving you to discover it.

The standard being worked to is WCAG 2.2, Level AA.

The honest version

Forklist is one person, working evenings. There is no accessibility team here and no consultancy on retainer, and nobody has yet sat down with this app and a screen reader and told me what it is like.

So read everything below as measured rather than proven by the people it is for. What I can promise is that these were checked instead of assumed. Every colour in the app was put through a contrast calculation against the surface actually behind it — twelve combinations that looked fine to me failed, and every one of them was changed. That is the standard for what goes on this page: things I went and verified.

What is here today

Seeing

• Six colour themes, each in light and dark, plus Follow system, under Settings → Appearance. The theme changes the colour; light or dark stays a separate choice, so no palette traps you in a brightness.
• Contrast is measured, not eyeballed. Every text colour in all twelve theme-and-mode combinations is checked against the surface it sits on at the 4.5:1 that AA asks for. The placeholder grey failed in every single theme — it had been compared against the wrong background — and all of them were darkened.
• Colour is never the only thing carrying meaning. Pins are coloured by whose spot it is, and the icon inside still says what kind of place it is. If you cannot separate the colours, the icons and the list still tell you everything.
• The map is never the only route to anything. Every spot on it is also a row in the list beside it, with the same notes, votes and controls. You can start there every time: Settings → Appearance → Open on → All spots.
• Photos are marked decorative. The pictures on a spot card come from Google, and the name of the place is already text right beside them — so a screen reader reads the name once instead of announcing an image it cannot describe.

Hearing

There is no sound anywhere in Forklist. No video, no voice notes, no autoplay, no notification chime. Nothing here needs captions or a transcript. That is a much smaller promise than a video platform can make, and it is a completely honest one.

Keyboard, and not using a pointer

• Tab reaches everything, and you can always see where you are. Focus draws a two-pixel outline in the theme accent, offset far enough not to sit on the edge of whatever it is marking.
• Escape closes whatever is open. Any dialog, the settings page, the account menu. It is asked of the page rather than kept as a hand-written list, so a new dialog cannot quietly be left out of it.
• The tabs are real tabs. The Friends and Groups switch under Social — and the sections inside Settings — are wired to the panels they actually control, so a screen reader can say which of them you are in and how many there are.
• Nothing needs a drag. The panel on a phone can be dragged shut, but the button in the dock underneath does the same job.
• Every field has a name of its own. Not a placeholder standing in for one — placeholders vanish the moment you start typing, which is the moment you are most likely to want to check what you are filling in.

Motion, and how much is going on

• A Reduce motion switch inside the app, at Settings → Appearance → Motion. It is separate from the system setting, for anyone whose computer is set to full motion but who wants this particular page to hold still.
• The system setting is obeyed without being asked for twice. If your device says reduce motion, every animation and transition here stops — including the small ones, the hover lifts and the chevrons.
• Loading placeholders go flat instead of shimmering. A shimmer that never resolves is the worst possible thing on the screen for someone who needs motion stopped.
• Nothing moves unless you moved it. No endless feed, no autoplay, no notification sliding in over the thing you were reading.
• Messages are chosen, not composed. Chats are a fixed set of phrases you pick from a list. That exists so the app can stay unmoderated safely, but it lands the same way for anybody who finds an empty text box hard: there is nothing here to word.

What is not done yet

I would much rather list these than have you discover them.

• Text size is fixed. Type is set in pixels, so raising your browser's default font size will not move it. Page zoom does work. A text-size setting in the app does not exist yet, and it should.
• The map itself is Google's. Its keyboard behaviour, its contrast and its labels belong to them and I cannot reach in and fix them. That is a large part of why the list carries every action the map does.
• No one has used this in anger with a screen reader. The markup is correct on inspection and the automated checks come back clean. Correct and usable are not the same thing, and I know which one of those I have.
• Windows High Contrast mode has not been looked at at all. If you use it, I would genuinely 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 is a website, so it inherits whatever your browser and your assistive technology can do. It is built against current web standards rather than against any particular screen reader, and the practical version of that is:

• A browser from the last couple of years. Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge, kept up to date. There is no app to install and nothing to keep in step.
• Whatever assistive technology you already use. Nothing here asks for a specific screen reader, magnifier or switch setup, and nothing detects which one you have.
• No minimum version has been tested, because no version has been tested. See the gaps above — I would rather tell you that than publish a support matrix I made up.

What other people write

Most of what is on this map was typed by somebody else, and that part is not mine to guarantee. A note can be up to 500 characters of ordinary prose, and nothing stops it being written in a way that is hard to follow.

What the app does do is keep the structure around it predictable. Notes carry no images, so there is no missing alt text to trip over. Messages are picked from a fixed list, so a conversation is always readable. Tags come from a set vocabulary rather than free text, so filtering never depends on how somebody spelled something. The parts a person can make inaccessible are deliberately small.

Consultation

Every large platform's accessibility page has a section here about their disabled users' advisory group and their external audit partner. Mine says: there has been no consultation. Nothing on this site has been reviewed by a disabled person, an accessibility specialist, or anyone but me.

That is the single biggest gap on this page, and it is not one I can close by writing more code. If you use a screen reader, a switch, voice control, or a magnifier, and you would be willing to spend twenty minutes telling me what this app is actually like — that is worth more than everything else on this page put together, and I would like to hear from you.

Reporting a problem

If something here does not work for you, say so, and be as specific as you can stand to be — what you were using, what you expected, and what happened instead. "The Friends tab announces nothing" is worth more to me than a hundred passing automated checks.

How to reach me

• Signed in: Settings → About → Contact whoever runs Forklist. It comes straight to me with your name and email attached, so I can write back.
• Not signed in: the support page has the other ways.

What happens then

• I read all of it myself. There is no queue, no triage team and no ticket number, because there is one person.
• I aim to reply within a week. That is an intention, not a service level — this is an evenings project and some weeks it will be slower.
• A barrier that stops you using the app at all jumps the queue, ahead of anything on the features list. Something cosmetic may wait a while, and I will say so rather than go quiet.
• What gets fixed gets written down, in the section below, with the date.

What has actually changed

A promise to improve is worth what the record behind it is worth, so here is the record. It starts the day the work started; it is not backdated to look longer.

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 — and all twelve were corrected.
• Removed the skip link from every page. It had been added so the first Tab offered to jump past the masthead; it is no longer part of the site, and this entry stays 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

One person builds Forklist, and that same person is accountable for this. There is nobody to escalate past and nobody to hide behind — if something on this page is wrong, it is wrong because I got it wrong.