Accessibility at photospace.

We build and maintain this site against WCAG 2.1 Level AA — the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by the W3C. It is the standard most widely used for websites like ours, and it is the bar we hold new work to.

We aim to meet that standard. We stop short of claiming this site fully conforms to it, because we don't think that claim can be made honestly by anyone who hasn't sat with real users of assistive technology — and we haven't yet. What we can tell you is what we test, what we found, and what we know is still wrong.

Every public page on this site is scanned against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 at levels A and AA, on both a desktop and a phone-sized viewport. That automated pass currently returns no violations on any of them.

Automated tools are not enough on their own, and we don't treat them as though they are. They reliably catch machine-checkable problems — missing names, broken roles, absent landmarks — and they routinely cannot judge colour contrast on a dark, image-heavy design like this one. So contrast is measured separately by sampling the actual rendered pixels behind the text, and keyboard operation, focus order, dialogs and reduced-motion behaviour are exercised by hand.

Two automated checks now run on every change before it can ship: one that fails the build if any of the site's main pages scrolls sideways at a 320-pixel-wide viewport, and one that fails if a date picker is added without the shared, contrast-checked theme. Both exist because a real defect got past us in exactly that way.

An audit on 31 August 2026 found five genuine Level A and AA failures. All five were fixed and deployed the same day: a date picker rendering in an unreadable default blue, category labels that were unreadable over photographs, four pages that scrolled sideways on a narrow phone, scrolling image bands that could not be paused by anyone using a keyboard, and one membership label that fell just under the required contrast.

The scrolling-bands issue is worth naming specifically, because it was the one that failed at Level A — the most basic tier of the standard. Those bands could be paused with a mouse and by no other means. They now have a real pause control, and they stop automatically for anyone whose system asks for reduced motion.

This site has not been tested with a real screen-reader user on the booking or estimate flows. That is the most significant gap on this list and the one we most want to close, because it is the evidence no tool can produce.

On some window sizes, the floating “Ask” assistant button can sit on top of the cheapest option in the booking wizard. It is a small overlap, it is on our list, and if it is in your way you can book that session by emailing or calling us instead.

Some controls — links in the site footer, and a few checkboxes on the estimate request form — are slightly smaller than the 24-pixel minimum introduced in the newer WCAG 2.2. They meet the 2.1 AA standard we target, but they are smaller than we would like and we intend to grow them.

The mobile navigation menu does not close when you press Escape. You can close it from the keyboard using its Close button, which is in the normal tab order, but Escape is what most people will try first.

Parts of the checkout and mapping experience are provided by Stripe and Google. We choose vendors carefully, but we do not control the accessibility of what they render, and we can't promise it meets the same bar as the pages we build ourselves.

This statement covers this website. It deliberately does not describe the accessibility of the building itself, because we would rather answer that honestly and specifically than publish a general claim you might rely on and find wrong when you arrive.

If you're planning a shoot and need to know about access to the space — getting in, moving around, parking, restrooms, or anything else — email or call us and we will tell you exactly what the studio is like. We would much rather have that conversation before you book.