Accessibility

Measured October 9, 2026

We want Our Heroes to work for everyone who visits a gallery: on a phone, from a keyboard, with a screen reader, or with JavaScript turned off. This page says what we aim for, how we measured it, what works today, what doesn’t yet, and how to tell us when something gets in your way.

What we aim for

Every public page of Our Heroes, every gallery and our own pages like this one, aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA, the level most accessibility rules in the United States refer to. It is an aim we measure ourselves against. Nobody has audited the site, and some of what the guidelines ask can only be checked by a person; those checks are listed below.

How we measured

On October 9, 2026 we ran an automated checker, axe-core, against every public page of the live site as a visitor sees it: 17 of our own pages and 20 pages from five galleries, the gallery pages a second time with JavaScript turned off. It tests the guidelines’ rules at levels A and AA. The first run found grey text on our own pages a shade too light; we darkened it the same day and ran the checker again. The second run found only two kinds of text the guidelines exempt: the small “Our” of our name, which is part of a logo, and the tiny dates inside the sample galleries we draw to show what a theme looks like, which are part of a picture.

What works today

• Every photograph in a gallery can be reached with the keyboard and opened with Enter. Each one also has a page of its own, which works without JavaScript.
• A photograph is named by its caption, in the family’s own words. One without a caption is called “Photograph 3 of 12”, or “Maggie, photograph 3 of 12” when the gallery names someone.
• An enlarged photograph opens as a dialog. Escape closes it, the keyboard stays inside it while it is open, and closing it takes you back to the photograph you came from. Its arrows go to the photograph you would look at next on the screen.
• Galleries are laid out for a phone as well as a computer.
• Text is dark enough to read against its background, measured in all eighteen gallery themes and on our own pages.
• With JavaScript turned off you can still look through a gallery, leave a message, give an award, report a gallery and write to us. Two extras need it: the heart, and suggesting a brand-new award.
• Every form field has a name a screen reader can announce.
• Pages reflow to a screen 320 pixels wide and to 200% zoom without scrolling sideways, and their text survives wider letter, word and line spacing without being cut off.
• Every link, button and field shows when it has the keyboard’s attention.
• Every page starts with a “Skip to the page” link for anyone using a keyboard (on a gallery, “Skip to the photographs”), and marks where its main content begins, so a screen reader can go straight to it.

What doesn’t work yet

• The pages you sign in to, where a gallery is built and looked after, are not yet held to this standard. Their fields are named and the gallery builder works by touch and from the keyboard, but it is a drag-and-drop editor whose only keyboard way to reorder is a pair of arrow buttons.
• Videos play from YouTube or Vimeo. Any captions are the ones the person who posted the video added there; we can’t add our own.
• Pressing Tab moves through a gallery’s photographs in the order the family arranged them. On a page with large photographs the screen can show them in a slightly different order, because smaller photographs fill the gaps beside the large ones.
• No one has yet tried the site with a screen reader, and the full-size zoom in Pro galleries hasn’t been tried from the keyboard. We’ll update this page as each check is made.