Ten pages at 100, and one real failure

Every page on this site now scores 100 for accessibility through PageSpeed Insights, which runs the audit on Google's hardware rather than on whatever laptop happens to be nearby. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a Lighthouse performance score measured locally describes the machine that measured it.

The audit found one real failure. On the cost comparison page, links inside body text were distinguished from the surrounding prose by colour alone. That is WCAG 1.4.1, and it fails for anyone who cannot reliably separate the accent colour from the body colour, which is a large number of people. The fix was to underline in-prose links site-wide rather than only on hover.

Worth noting what found it. Nobody looking at the page noticed, because to anyone who sees the colour difference the links are obvious. A contrast failure at 4.35 to 1 shipped on this site earlier in the month and was caught the same way, by measurement rather than by eye. Both were invisible to the person who built them.

The part that is not a boast

A published accessibility statement now says, in as many words, that the score is not a conformance claim and that it would be dishonest to present it as one.

Automated tooling finds a minority of the ways a page can fail somebody. It cannot tell whether a link makes sense read out of context, whether a heading order describes the page or merely sizes it, or whether a form that passes every check is still unusable with a screen reader. Those need a person, and ideally a person who uses one.

So the statement also says plainly that no part of this site has been tested by anyone who relies on a screen reader day to day, and that until it has there will be failures nobody here has thought of. That is a worse sentence to publish than a score, and it is the accurate one.

The statement quotes no number at all, deliberately. A page saying "100 on every route" dates the moment it is written and is wrong the next time anything ships. What is durable is the standard, the method, the date of the last audit and the honest limits of that method. A score belongs in a build log, where it is understood to be a reading taken on a particular day, which is exactly what this is.