Accessibility

Last updated 7 September 2026

What we are aiming at

The target is WCAG 2.1 level AA. We are not claiming certification and nobody independent has audited the site; what we can tell you is exactly what we test, what those tests currently say, and which failures we already know about.

What is in place

The awkward part of a card site is the board itself, so most of the work is there.Every card, pile and slot you can act on is a real button — not a clickable div — with a label that says what it is rather than where it sits: "King of hearts, tableau column 4", not "column 4, card 2". They are reachable with the keyboard in reading order, and the focus ring is a solid three-pixel outline that we have deliberately not styled away.

Where a board shows cards that are face up but not playable — an opponent's meld, a trick still on the table, a column you can read but not touch — they are marked as images carrying their full name rather than hidden away, so somebody using a screen reader can read down a whole column to plan a move, exactly as a sighted player scans it. Nothing on a board is drag-and-drop either: every move is select-then-click, which works with a keyboard, a switch, or a shaky hand.

Beyond the boards: a skip link to the main content, proper landmarks, one h1 per page with headings in order, a declared page language, text that reflows without a horizontal scrollbar down to a 320-pixel screen — which is what page zoom depends on, and which five of the boards failed until this week — and every animation on the site reduced to nothing when your system asks for less motion. That last one matters here more than on most sites, because a card board moves a lot of cards.

When a hand or a game ends, a summary panel opens over the board. Focus moves into it and lands on the button you are most likely to want — "Next hand", "New game" — so the panel announces itself and Enter does the obvious thing. Tab cycles inside the panel rather than wandering off into the board behind it, and when the panel closes focus is put back on the board rather than dropped at the top of the page. That was broken until this week and is the fault this page previously listed as its most serious.

On colour: the card backs are deliberately red on a green table, which is the hardest pairing for the most common form of colour blindness. They stay distinguishable through lightness and a woven stripe pattern rather than hue, so they read correctly with no colour perception at all. If that ever needs revisiting the fix will be a pattern change, not a different colour.

How we check

Every page is run through axe-core against the WCAG 2.1 A and AA rule sets, on the built site rather than in development. As of this update that reports zero violations across the pages sampled. Automated testing catches perhaps a third of real accessibility problems, so it is a floor and not a pass mark.

Alongside that we check by hand that the keyboard reaches everything on a board and that the focus ring is genuinely visible, and we measure the page for horizontal overflow down to a 320-pixel screen. This week's run found 42 pieces of small print — table captions, figure captions, stat labels, "last updated" lines — sitting at about 4:1 contrast where AA needs 4.5:1. That was one shared colour used everywhere, and darkening it fixed all 42 at once.

The dialog behaviour above is tested the same way: a script plays a game until a summary panel opens, then checks that focus actually moved into it, that Tab and Shift-Tab both stay inside, and that focus lands somewhere sensible afterwards. The first version of the fix passed three of those four and quietly failed the last one, which is exactly the sort of thing you do not find by reading the code.

What is still wrong

This section had three entries when the page was first written. Two of them — dialogs that did not manage focus, and five boards that pushed past the edge of a small screen — were fixed within a day of being written down, which is rather the point of listing them. One remains, and it is the one we cannot fix by ourselves.

The parts that are genuinely hard

Some of this is not a bug to be fixed but a property of the thing. A card game is spatial: a tableau is understood at a glance in a way that a list of forty labelled buttons is not, and no amount of markup fully closes that gap. Some games also lean on memory by design — Go Fish is about remembering what was asked — and where we can, the board shows that information instead of expecting you to hold it, which happens to help far more people than it was originally aimed at.

Timed elements are kept minimal for the same reason. Boards pause briefly so you can see a completed trick before it clears, and nothing on the site requires a fast reaction or times you out.

Tell us

If something here does not work for you, we would like to know — particularly what you were using at the time, because that is usually the part we cannot guess. Reports of real problems get priority over anything else on the list — write to hello@cardgameclassics.com.