Skip to main content
Nixon Creative Studio

Accessibility

Built to be used by everyone.

I build this site toward WCAG 2.1 AA, in both the light and the dark theme, and I check it on every change. No website is ever perfectly accessible, so if anything is hard to use with a keyboard or a screen reader, tell me and I'll fix it: nathan@nixoncreativestudio.com.

Last updated June 27, 2026

The standard

The goal is WCAG 2.1 AA, the same standard most public bodies and larger organizations are held to, and it applies in both the light and the dark theme. Each page is built to score 100 on Lighthouse's accessibility audit, and an automated check runs on every change so that score does not quietly slip. That automated score is a useful floor, not a certificate: it catches the machine-checkable issues, which are only one part of the picture.

In practice

A few of the things that means on this site:

  • Everything you can do with a mouse, you can do with a keyboard. The focus outline is always visible, and a "Skip to main content" link is the first thing you reach.
  • Real landmarks and a clean heading order, so a screen reader can move through a page by region and by heading instead of reading it all top to bottom.
  • Every form field has a visible label, uses the right input type, and announces its own errors rather than signalling them with color alone.
  • Text is chosen to clear the AA contrast bar against its background in both the light and the dark theme. Images that carry meaning have descriptions; purely decorative ones are hidden from assistive tech.
  • If your device is set to reduce motion, the animations and the smooth scrolling switch off automatically.

How it is checked

The accessibility score is a hard gate: a change cannot ship if it drops a page below 100. On top of that, the pages are run through axe-core (a widely used accessibility testing engine) in both themes, and structural changes get a manual keyboard pass from the address bar through every control. Automated tools like these only cover part of WCAG; the rest is judgment, whether the alt text is actually useful, whether the reading order makes sense, so I treat the tooling as a safety net under the hands-on work, not a stand-in for it.

Where it stops short

I aim for AA, not the stricter AAA, on purpose, in line with the W3C's own guidance that AAA is not meant as a blanket requirement for a whole site. A couple of AAA rules pull against a brand-led design: the deepest brand-blue text sits just under the 7:1 enhanced-contrast bar, for one. So the work targets AA and stops there by choice, not by oversight.

That is a line about polish, not about whether the site works. If a specific thing is genuinely hard for you to use, that is a bug, and the next section is how to flag it.

Found a problem?

If a page is hard to read, hard to get through, or breaks with the assistive technology you rely on, email nathan@nixoncreativestudio.com and tell me what happened and what you were using. It reaches a real person, me, and I treat accessibility problems as real problems to fix, not as nice-to-haves.

Last updated: June 27, 2026.