Accessibility

Accessibility at H₂Oh!

Last updated 14 September 2026

Water quality problems fall hardest on people who already have the least slack — and that overlaps heavily with disability. A water tool that only works for sighted mouse users is failing the people who need it most. We treat that as a defect, not a nice-to-have.

Our target

We are working towards WCAG 2.2 Level AA. We are not there yet, and this page says honestly where we stand rather than claiming conformance we have not earned.

What is in place

Each of these has been checked against the shipped pages, not just intended:

Semantic HTML landmarks, and one h1 per screen with no skipped heading levels.
A “skip to main content” link on every page.
Visible keyboard focus indicators on every interactive element.
Full keyboard operability — including menus, expandable sections and dialogs.
Dialogs that trap focus, close on Esc, and return focus where you left it.
Visible labels on every form field, not placeholder text alone.
Status messages announced to screen readers via live regions.
Information never conveyed by colour alone — grades and risk levels always carry text.
prefers-reduced-motion respected throughout.
A forced-colors block so focus and borders survive Windows High Contrast mode.
All text and interface colours meeting the 4.5:1 contrast minimum, verified by calculation rather than by eye.
A control in the footer to clear everything H₂Oh! has stored in your browser.

Known gaps

Being specific is more useful to you than a blanket claim:

The interactive U.S. map is a visual component. Every city it shows is also reachable through the state lists and the ZIP search, which are keyboard accessible — but the map itself is not an equivalent experience yet.
Heading coverage inside the report is thin. Heading order is correct where headings exist, but several sections of a city report are styled to look like headings without being marked up as one. That makes it harder to navigate the page by heading. We are working through them.
Charts and data visualisations have text alternatives that summarise rather than fully describe them.
200% zoom and text-spacing overrides have not been formally tested. The layout is built to reflow and we have not seen it break, but that is not the same as having verified it.
No testing with assistive technology by disabled testers has happened yet. Everything above was verified by automated checks and our own review. That is not the same thing, and we are not going to describe it as if it were.

Standards and third-party content

Some content on H₂Oh! originates elsewhere — news headlines, and the public agency records themselves. We control how they are presented, not how they are written. Where an agency’s own wording is unclear, we try to explain it in plain language alongside the original.

Tell us when we get it wrong

If any part of H₂Oh! is unusable for you, please tell us what you were trying to do, the page you were on, and the assistive technology and browser you were using. We treat accessibility reports as bugs and prioritise them accordingly.

Contact: [INFORMATION NEEDED FROM FOUNDER — accessibility contact address]