Accessibility

Last reviewed 19 September 2026 · self assessed, not externally audited

We sell accessibility audits, so it would be poor form to be vague about our own site. This page says what standard whitfield.it aims at, what we have actually checked, what passes, what does not yet, and how to tell us when something gets in your way.

The standard we aim at

We aim to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That is the same bar we measure a client’s site against.

Whitfield IT is a private company, not a public sector body, so the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 do not apply to this site. We hold it to WCAG 2.2 AA anyway, because it is the right standard and because we would look foolish selling it otherwise.

How this was assessed

This site was assessed by us, on 19 September 2026. It has not been audited by an external organisation, and it has not been through a user testing programme with disabled people. Nobody has certified it.

What the assessment actually consisted of:

• reading the delivered HTML of a 41 page sample drawn across every page type on the site, plus every one of the 15 pages that carries a form
• checking each interactive component we build ourselves: the FAQ accordions, the mobile menu, the yes and no toggles on the enquiry forms, and the audit box on the homepage
• measuring the contrast of the colour tokens the site is built from, in both the light and the dark theme
• checking labels, headings, landmarks, page language, image alternatives, duplicate identifiers and keyboard focus order in the markup
• running the accordion, menu and toggle code through a test harness, to confirm that the state it reports to assistive technology matches the state on screen. 17 checks, all passing

What we believe meets the standard

• Every form control has a label a screen reader can use. We counted 258 visible controls across the 15 form pages. All 258 now have one.
• The FAQ accordions announce whether they are open or closed. 208 accordion buttons in the sample, all of them carrying their state.
• The mobile menu button reports whether the menu is open, and the Escape key closes the menu and puts focus back on the button.
• Every page has a skip link as the first thing a keyboard reaches, pointing at the main content.
• Keyboard focus is visible. Form fields across the site used to remove the focus ring. They now show one on keyboard focus, and nothing changes for someone using a mouse.
• Text contrast passes AA in both themes. The lowest combination we measured was 4.53 to 1, against a requirement of 4.5 to 1.
• Form field edges pass the 3 to 1 rule. Fixed on 19 September 2026. Text fields, selects, checkboxes and text areas used to draw a border that measured about 1.2 to 1 against the background behind them, well under what WCAG 1.4.11 asks for. They now measure 3.70 to 1 in the dark theme and 3.37 to 1 in the light theme against the field’s own fill, and both clear 3 to 1 against the page background and the card the form sits on. The change is confined to form controls. Card edges, rules and dividers are untouched, because 1.4.11 does not apply to them.
• Headings run in order with one h1 per page, and no level is skipped, on every page we checked.
• Images carry a text alternative. 58 images across the sample, all of them had one.
• Every page declares its language, has a unique page title, and repeats no element identifier.
• Icon only buttons and the social links are named, so they do not read as unlabelled buttons.
• Error messages on the enquiry forms sit in a live region, so assistive technology is told about them rather than them only appearing on screen, and a field that fails validation is marked as invalid.

What we know is not right yet

This is the honest half of the page. None of these is fixed as of 19 September 2026.

• We have not listened to the site with a screen reader. Everything above was verified by reading markup and measuring colour, not by running NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver over the pages. That is the largest gap in this assessment and we are not going to dress it up as anything else.
• We have not walked the whole site by keyboard. We checked the components and the focus styling, not every page, tab stop by tab stop.
• We checked that images have a text alternative, not that each one is well written. Presence is not quality.
• Decorative icons are not formally hidden from screen readers. Most current screen readers skip them anyway, so the practical effect is small, but it is not the belt and braces treatment.
• Opening the mobile menu does not move focus into it. Escape closes it and returns focus to the button, but focus is not trapped inside the menu while it is open.
• The contact form’s error handling is the Contact Form 7 plugin’s, not ours. Its live region is in place and we have read the code, but we have not tested how it sounds.
• Only a sample was checked. 41 of 244 pages, chosen to cover every page type. Pages of the same type are built from the same template, so a fault in one is a fault in all of them, but we have not opened all 244.
• No third party tooling has been run over the site, and no automated report backs this page up.

What changed on 19 September 2026

Until that date this site carried three faults we would have written up on a client’s site:

• the contact form had no labels at all. Every field was placeholder text only, which fails WCAG 3.3.2, because a placeholder disappears the moment you start typing and never comes back
• the FAQ accordions never told a screen reader whether a panel was open or shut, which fails WCAG 4.1.2
• there was no accessibility statement, so none of this was written down anywhere

All three are now fixed, along with the enquiry forms, the mobile menu, the missing skip link and the invisible focus ring. We are saying this out loud rather than quietly patching it, because how a supplier behaves when the fault is their own is worth knowing before you hire them.

If something here blocks you

Tell us. We would rather hear it from you than not know.

• Use the form on our contact page
• Email hello@whitfield.it
• Ring 01244 565 666

Tell us the page, and what happened when you tried to use it. If you are using assistive technology, telling us which one helps us reproduce the problem. We aim to reply within one working day, and we will tell you honestly whether we can fix it quickly, whether it will take longer, or whether we are not going to fix it and why.

Why this page does not read like a government one

The Government Digital Service publishes a model accessibility statement. It is written for public sector bodies, and it commits the organisation to things such as a statutory enforcement route that does not apply to a private company. Copying that wording here would read well and would be false, so we have not. This page is written from what we actually checked.

Where we stand on this generally

We offer an accessibility audit as a paid service, and the fixes as a separate one. This page is that discipline turned on our own site. It is not the full paid audit: that includes screen reader and keyboard testing done by a person, which is exactly what is missing from the list above. It will be reviewed again when the site changes materially, and the date at the top will change when it is.