Heritage Healthy Kitchen is a recipe site, and a recipe is only useful if you can actually read it. I want the site to work for people who browse with a screen reader, who navigate by keyboard, who enlarge the text, or who do not see colour the way most people do.
This page explains what I aim for, what is already in place, what still falls short, and how to tell me when something does not work for you.
The standard I aim for
I aim to meet WCAG 2.1 level AA, the guidelines most accessibility laws around the world point to, including the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States and the European Accessibility Act.
I say aim deliberately. Automated tests on the site currently report no failures against that standard, but no automated test can confirm that a page is genuinely usable. I have not yet run the site past people who use assistive technology every day, and until I do, I would rather describe this as a serious ongoing effort than claim full conformance.
What that means in practice
- Every image has a description. Screen readers announce what is in each photo instead of skipping it or reading out a file name.
- The whole site works from the keyboard. You can reach every link, button and form field with the Tab key, and the element you are on is always visibly outlined.
- Each page starts with a “Skip to content” link, so you do not have to tab through the entire menu on every recipe. Recipe articles add jump links straight to the ingredients, the instructions and the nutrition table.
- Headings follow a real structure, with no skipped levels, so screen reader users can navigate an article by its outline the way a sighted reader skims it.
- Text meets contrast requirements. Body text, links, labels and the recipe cards are all at or above the required ratio against their background.
- Links inside paragraphs are underlined, not marked by colour alone, so they stay recognisable if you do not distinguish those colours.
- Comparison tables have proper header cells, so a screen reader says “Calories, 320 kcal” rather than reading a number with nothing attached to it.
- Pages reflow rather than break. The layout holds at 320 pixels wide, at 200% browser zoom, and with increased letter and line spacing.
How the site is tested
Every page on the site — every article, every category, every collection — is checked automatically against WCAG 2.1 AA using axe-core, the same engine behind most browser accessibility tools. Those checks run again every week, so a change that breaks something gets caught within days rather than discovered by a reader months later.
Automated checking has a known ceiling: it catches roughly a third of accessibility problems. Things like whether an image description is actually helpful, or whether a recipe makes sense read aloud from top to bottom, need a human. That is the gap I am working on closing, and it is the main reason this page asks for your feedback.
Known limitations
Being straight about what is not fixed:
- The cookie consent banner comes from a third-party plugin and I cannot edit its internals. It contains two labels that point to controls which are not on the page — harmless in practice, but untidy in the accessibility tree.
- The comment form without JavaScript. Spam protection renames the comment field using JavaScript. With JavaScript switched off, the label may not be announced correctly alongside the field.
- Nutrition tables on small phones. The tables fit the screen, but a few long column headings wrap mid-word at the narrowest sizes.
- No testing with real assistive technology users yet. This is the biggest gap and the one I would most like to hear about from you.
Tell me when something does not work
If any part of this site is hard to use, please write to hello@heritagehealthykitchen.com. You do not need to know the technical terms — “I could not find the ingredients on this page with my screen reader” is exactly the kind of message that helps.
It helps if you can include the address of the page, what you were trying to do, and what you use to browse — a screen reader, keyboard only, high zoom, whatever it is. Heritage Healthy Kitchen is a one-person project, so a reply may take a few days, but every message gets read, and accessibility reports go to the front of the queue.
If the problem is urgent and you need a recipe you cannot currently read, say so, and I will send it to you in whatever format works for you.
Status of this statement
This statement was prepared on 15 September 2026, following a full accessibility review of the site, and reflects its state on that date. It is reviewed whenever the weekly automated checks report something new, and at minimum whenever the site’s design changes.