Accessibility

Mental health information should reach everyone who needs it, including people who use screen readers, navigate by keyboard, rely on captions, or need larger text and higher contrast. We build Shrinktionary with that in mind, and we treat accessibility as part of the work, not an afterthought.

Our standard

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA. That standard covers four principles: content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. We use it as our baseline for every page, and we check new templates against it before they ship.

What we do

Every page uses a single, descriptive H1 and a logical heading order, so screen reader users can move through the structure quickly. Color is never the only way we convey meaning, and we hold body text to a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 against its background. Interactive elements, including the search box, the menu, and the term web, are reachable and operable with a keyboard alone, and a visible focus outline shows where you are. There's a skip-to-content link at the top of every page. Images that carry meaning have descriptive alternative text, and decorative images are hidden from assistive technology. We use real, semantic HTML for links, buttons, and lists rather than styled stand-ins, which is what robust support for assistive technology depends on.

Plain language as accessibility

Accessibility isn't only technical. The entire point of Shrinktionary is to put mental health language into plain English, which is itself an accessibility measure for the many people that dense clinical writing leaves behind. We write short sentences, define terms as we go, and avoid jargon wherever a simpler word works.

The analytics banner and the share controls

The banner that asks about analytics is deliberately not a modal. It doesn't trap your focus, you can dismiss it with the Escape key, and if you ignore it entirely, nothing loads and nothing is measured. When it opens, focus moves to it so it isn't silently skipped, and when you answer, focus goes back to where you were. The share controls on each entry are real buttons and links, reachable by keyboard, and the "copy link" result is announced rather than only shown.

Where we're still improving

No site is ever perfectly accessible, and ours is no exception. The interactive term web, which is a visual graph, is the hardest piece to make fully equivalent for non-visual users. Every node in it is a real, focusable link you can reach with Tab and open with Enter, and we publish the same connections as plain text links, guided pathways you can read in order, and a machine-readable concept graph. Even so, a force-directed map is a visual idea at heart, and we keep working on the alternatives.

How we check

We test with a keyboard alone to confirm every interactive element can be reached and used without a mouse, and we check that the visible focus indicator never disappears. We verify color contrast against the WCAG thresholds, review heading structure on each template, and sanity-check pages with a screen reader so the reading order and labels make sense out loud. New templates get this pass before they ship, and we re-check when we change something structural.

Tell us about a barrier

If something on Shrinktionary is hard to use with your tools, we want to know, and we'll treat it as a real bug rather than a nice-to-have. Reach us through our contact page and describe the page you were on, the device or assistive technology you were using, and what went wrong. The more specific you can be, the faster we can reproduce and fix it. We read every report and respond, and accessibility fixes go to the front of the line.