These pages are built to be read on a phone, on a laptop, through a screen reader, and on paper. Accessibility is checked automatically before anything is published, and the known limits are listed at the bottom of this page rather than left out.
What is checked before a page publishes
- Contrast. Every colour pair in the design system is recomputed against WCAG 2.1 on every build. Normal text must reach 4.5:1 and large text 3:1. A pair that fails holds the release; it is not a warning that can be ignored.
- Heading order. One h1 per page, and no skipped levels.
- Alternative text. Every image carries alt text. Decorative graphics — the safety-alert triangles in the hazard panels — are hidden from assistive technology, and the hazard level is announced as text instead.
- Keyboard. A skip link, a visible focus outline on every focusable element, and no positive tabindex anywhere to disturb the natural order.
- Structure. Steps are ordered lists, tables have real header cells, the page language is declared, and hazard panels are exposed as labelled notes.
The interactive checklist
On a procedure page each step number is a control. Activating it cycles the step through three states: to do, on hold, and done. Activating it again always brings the step back — a checklist you cannot un-tick is a checklist people stop trusting, and marking the wrong row is an ordinary thing to do.
How that is built to stay usable:
- Nothing depends on colour. The shape of the number chip changes too — a square for to do, an open circle for on hold, a filled marker for done — and completed step text is struck through. The control's accessible name states the status in words and says what activating it will do next.
- Keyboard first. The chips are real buttons in document order, reachable by Tab and activated by Enter or Space, with a visible focus outline. Each change is announced through a polite live region.
- It works without JavaScript. The number renders as plain text and the procedure reads exactly as it always did. The script upgrades the number to a button on load, so you are never shown a control that does nothing.
- No state hides content. Marking steps done never collapses, hides or dims a hazard notice. Hazard blocks sit outside the step list entirely, and an automated test refuses the build if one ever ends up inside it.
- It prints. Progress marks are preserved on paper, so a job half finished at the bench prints as a job half finished.
Progress is remembered on your own device only, and is cleared automatically when the procedure is revised. See the privacy page.
Design decisions that help
Body text is set at a comfortable size with generous line spacing, and the measure is limited so lines stay easy to track. Nothing depends on colour alone: a hazard panel carries a signal word as text, and an unverified specification says unverified in words as well as in red.
Pages are self-contained. There are no web fonts to fail to load, no layout shift from late resources, and no JavaScript required to read a procedure. Search needs JavaScript; nothing else does.
Every procedure has a print stylesheet, because these documents get printed and carried to the work. In print, hazard colours are preserved, hazard panels and step rows are kept from breaking across pages, and link destinations are printed after the link text.
Where a standard constrains the design
The hazard panel colours are fixed by ANSI Z535, and the letter colours are fixed with them: white on safety red for DANGER, black on safety orange for WARNING, black on safety yellow for CAUTION, white on safety blue for NOTICE. Those are not free choices. Where the contrast requirement and the standard could have collided, the resolution was to follow ANSI on the colour and to set the signal word at a size and weight that clears the contrast requirement comfortably.
Known limits
- The comment section is provided by Giscus and rendered in a third-party frame. Its accessibility is not under this site's control.
- Automated checks catch measurable failures. They do not prove a page is usable with a screen reader in practice, and no claim of full conformance is made on the strength of them alone.
- Some source documents linked as citations are PDFs published by other organisations. Their accessibility is theirs.
Reporting a barrier
If something here is hard to use, please say so through the address on the contact page. Tell us the page and what happened. An accessibility defect is treated as a defect in the page, logged in the public corrections log, and fixed in the template so it is fixed everywhere at once.