Accessibility Statement

1. Our commitment

Lavender Common wants this website to be usable by everyone, including people who use assistive technology, rely on keyboard navigation, or need reduced motion. We're not legally required to meet the UK's Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations, since we're not a public sector body — but we've aimed for WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a voluntary standard throughout.

2. Conformance status

This site is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 AA. Partially conformant means some parts of the site don't yet fully meet the standard — see the known limitations below. This status is based on our own review during development, not a third-party audit.

3. What we've built

These are genuinely in place across the site, not aspirational:

• ✓Reduced motion is respected sitewide — anyone with prefers-reduced-motion enabled gets instant state changes instead of animations, across every interactive element on every page.
• ✓Visible focus states on every interactive element (links, buttons, form fields), not just the browser default.
• ✓Semantic HTML structure — proper header, nav, main, and footer landmarks on every page, so assistive technology can navigate the page's structure.
• ✓All form fields have properly associated labels, not just placeholder text standing in for one.
• ✓Icon-only controls (the mobile menu button, carousel arrows, decorative diagrams) have descriptive aria-labels or are marked aria-hidden where purely decorative.
• ✓A colour system designed around a hard rule against low-contrast text combinations, applied consistently across every page.

4. Known limitations

These are real gaps, not hedging — flagged here deliberately so they can be tracked and fixed:

• !There's no "skip to main content" link, so keyboard users currently have to tab through the full header and navigation on every page load.
• !The mobile menu button doesn't announce its open/closed state to assistive technology, and doesn't trap or return focus when opened or closed.
• !Colour contrast has been designed carefully but never run through a formal contrast-checking tool — some faint or decorative text may not meet AA when measured precisely.
• !No testing has been carried out with real screen readers (VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS) or with actual assistive-technology users.
• !Placeholder images are currently marked decorative and skipped by screen readers — once real photography is added, each one will need genuine descriptive alt text, and that hasn't happened yet.
• !Dynamic updates — like a form showing a success message, or the news feed filtering — aren't currently announced to screen reader users as they happen.
• !Heading structure hasn't been rigorously audited page by page, so there may be places where heading levels skip or don't nest logically.

5. Feedback & reporting problems

If you find something on this site you can't access, or something that would be easier to use with a different approach, we want to know. Contact us at director@lavendercommon.com and we'll do our best to help directly, and to fix the underlying issue.

6. Technical information

This site is built with standard HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, and is designed to work across current versions of major browsers on both desktop and mobile. It doesn't rely on any browser plugins or non-standard technology.

7. How this was prepared

This statement was prepared through a self-assessment during development, checking the site's own code and behaviour against WCAG 2.1 AA — not a full audit by an accessibility specialist or testing with real assistive-technology users. We intend to have both done properly before this statement is treated as final.