Accessibility

What I’m aiming for

Motion Retirement is built for a 50+ audience, so accessibility is not an afterthought. The aim is to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C. This is a statement of intent and ongoing effort, not a claim that every page fully conforms.

What has been done

Every build of this site checks color contrast automatically, against a maintained list of the text and background combinations the pages actually produce. Two things sit outside that check and it is fairer to name them than to imply otherwise: text drawn inside the animated graphics, and the play symbol that sits over a video thumbnail, because neither has a fixed background a checker can measure. Body text is held to a minimum size larger than the guidelines strictly require, because small low-contrast text is especially hard to read at this audience’s age. That floor covers body text; labels drawn inside the animated graphics are not held to it, and some of them render smaller than that on a phone. Interactive elements such as footer and navigation links are sized so they are easy to tap on a phone. Pages are structured with a single main heading, and the site works with a keyboard alone, without relying on a mouse.

Images that carry meaning — the charts and diagrams — have a written description for screen readers. Images that are decoration, such as video thumbnails and background clips, are deliberately left undescribed so a screen reader skips them rather than reading a filename aloud; the link beside each one already says what it is.

Motion is used sparingly, and the site respects your device’s "reduce motion" setting where it applies.

Known limitations

This is an ongoing effort rather than a finished one. The specific gaps known today:

• Video captions come from YouTube’s automatic captioning. No video on this site carries a caption track written or corrected by a person, so accuracy varies — particularly on names, figures and tax terms. Captions are switched on by default when a video starts here, so they are there without having to be found, but automatic captioning is what they are.
• Video pages no longer carry a written transcript. They were removed in August 2026. Each page describes what the video covers, but there is no full text alternative to the spoken content. Taken with the point above, that means someone who cannot hear the audio has automatic captions and nothing more accurate — a known gap, named here rather than left for you to discover.
• The animated graphics on the topic pages have no visible pause control unless your device or browser is set to reduce motion, in which case they do not animate and a play control appears. The chart on the home page does have a visible pause control.
• The booking form is supplied by an outside company (Typeform) and is rendered inside this site rather than built by it. Its accessibility is theirs rather than mine, and I have no conformance statement from them for it. Typeform says its embedded forms have not been tested for accessibility and recommends the full-page version instead, so the form page offers that version as a link above the embedded one.
• Some older or more complex pages, including interactive charts and tools, may not yet meet every guideline.

Known limitations are tracked in writing rather than carried in someone’s head, and they are worked through in priority order. That is a description of how this is handled, not a promise about timing.

Reporting a problem

If you run into something on this site that is hard to use because of a disability, please say so. There is deliberately no public email address here, so the routes are: reply to the newsletter, which arrives from an address I read myself, or leave a comment on the YouTube channel (opens in a new tab), which needs nothing from this site at all. The contact page lists both. Describe the page and what happened, and it will be looked at.

Being straight about the gap in that: the newsletter route starts with a form, and the booking form is not a sensible way to report that a form is unusable. The YouTube channel is the route that needs no form on this site.