Accessibility Statement

We target WCAG 2.1 Level AA (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) for the Alien Tavern website, and the equivalent platform accessibility guidance for the iOS, Android, and macOS apps. Conformance is a practice rather than a finish line: parts of Alien Tavern meet the target today, some parts exceed it, and the "Known limitations" section below is honest about the parts that do not yet.

Every code change runs an accessibility audit before it can ship:

• Two independent engines — axe-core and HTML_CodeSniffer — audit around twenty representative flows, including signed-in pages such as the feed, settings, chat, dating, and moderation tools.
• Deterministic findings fail the build. That includes structural best-practice rules (page headings, landmark regions, heading order) that many pipelines only warn about.
• Automated checks also cover HTML validity and browser-console errors across the site.

Automated testing cannot catch everything — a page can pass every scanner and still be miserable with a screen reader — which is why we also test by hand.

Some of this testing is performed by an AI assistant (Claude) driving a real browser under the maintainer's direction — those items are labeled below, and every finding is verified and fixed in code like any other bug.

• AI-performed: reviewing pages through the accessibility tree — the same view a screen reader gets — checking that controls have names and roles, focus order is sensible, and dialogs move focus correctly.
• AI-performed: complete keyboard-only journeys with real key events — the skip-to-content link, tab order and visible focus styles, logging in, writing a post, using dialogs and pickers. That testing is what recently fixed focus handling in our dialogs (focus is now trapped while a dialog is open and returned to where you were when it closes).
• Maintainer-performed: independent external accessibility scanners run against the live site from real devices; their findings are treated as bugs, not suggestions. Recent examples that led to fixes: a missing page heading, advertisement content outside any landmark, and text that lost contrast when Android WebViews applied automatic darkening.
• The website supports light, dark, and system color schemes natively (including correct color-scheme declarations so auto-darkening browsers do not distort colors) and respects prefers-reduced-motion.
• For the mobile and desktop apps, a static accessibility audit now runs in the app codebase's linter (checking that controls carry roles and labels), and we keep a written VoiceOver and TalkBack test plan covering the critical flows. We have not yet completed those manual screen-reader passes — see Known limitations.

Alien Tavern lets members style their own posts and profiles with custom HTML and CSS — expressive freedom that accessibility tooling cannot fully police in advance. We help on both sides:

• When you publish a styled post, we automatically check it for common accessibility problems (like low-contrast text) and offer one-tap fixes.
• Member content is sanitized so it cannot hide or hijack assistive-technology navigation for the rest of the page.

• The 3D lobby (Beach Party) and the animated news broadcast are WebGL experiences. They are not yet meaningfully usable with a screen reader, and some interactions require a pointer. The information they carry is available in accessible form elsewhere: the news broadcast has a text article list at /news, and chat is available outside the 3D world.
• The space theme uses translucent, glowing surfaces whose contrast cannot always be verified automatically; if you find a spot that is hard to read, the light and dark themes are fully supported alternatives — and please tell us.
• Manual screen-reader testing of the mobile and desktop apps has not been performed yet. A written VoiceOver/TalkBack test plan exists, but until those passes happen, app flows may have unlabeled or awkwardly ordered elements. This is our biggest known gap.
• Member-created content may not always meet contrast or structure guidelines despite our automated suggestions.