Accessibility on These Pages
Nobody reads about a leak under their floor in comfort. The main valve is shut off, a towel is holding back whatever came up through the tile, and the reading happens on a phone braced against one knee.
Conditions like that expose a website quickly, so accessibility here is part of how the pages get built, not a notice added at the end.
The standard these pages are built against
These pages are built against WCAG 2.2 at Level AA. That is the W3C's yardstick, and it is the one federal and state accessibility rules in this country keep pointing back to.
Built against is the honest phrasing. No outside auditor has been through the site, so nothing here amounts to a certification. What follows is a record of build choices, verified by hand and correctable by any reader who hits something it gets wrong.
What the pages already do
| Measure | Where you notice it |
|---|---|
| Structure | Headings run in sequence under a single H1, and each major area of the layout is marked as a region, so screen reader software moves between them in one keystroke. Links are worded to make sense pulled out of context |
| Keyboard operation | Tab reaches every link, call button, menu control and FAQ toggle, and whatever currently holds focus is ringed in 3 pixels of outline. Nothing opens on its own, nothing expires, nothing swallows the cursor |
| Tap targets | Call controls measure 48 pixels or more from top to bottom, and 44 at the very narrowest, sized for a thumb that is wet and in a hurry |
| Color contrast | Each text and background pairing was measured to the AA thresholds, 4.5 to 1 at body size and 3 to 1 at heading size. Nothing on the site relies on hue alone to be understood |
| Scripts optional | Prose, navigation, grids and the dial button all work with JavaScript switched off. Two small scripts run when it is on: the analytics tag that counts page views, and one that swaps a city name into two labels near the number. Block both and neutral wording stands in place of the city |
| Motion | A single dot next to the call button pulses to signal that the helpline is staffed. Switch your device to reduced motion and it holds still. There is no other animation, and nothing here plays sound |
| Images | Photographs come with alt text written about the frame itself, the dark seam along the grout, the low flow indicator turning while the house sits idle, so the evidence holds up when pictures are off or slow |
| Tables | Price and method grids carry proper header cells and live inside a box that scrolls on its own axis, leaving the surrounding article still |
| FAQ blocks | Question blocks use the browser's built in disclosure element. Enter or Space opens one, no script takes part, and the answer sits in the page source either way |
Five things still unfixed
- No outside audit. Verification is internal so far: tabbing through templates, zooming to 200 percent, measuring contrast pairs, listening to a few pages with a screen reader. Real testing, but not a third party review, so read the AA target above as intent.
- Generated pictures get thinner descriptions. Every photograph here is machine generated, and its alt text starts as a machine draft that an editor tightens before it ships. A person writing the same description would usually name more: the hairline crack behind the damp patch, the fitting half buried in mud. The photo walkthrough of slab leak evidence leans on images harder than any other page, so the prose beside each frame carries what the alt text leaves out.
- Long data tables fight small screens. Four repair routes side by side across several columns force horizontal scrolling, and at high magnification the row label disappears on the way across. If that grid is unusable for you, the numbers behind the slab leak repair cost breakdown can be read to you on the phone.
- The collapsed menu is announced wrong. Hiding navigation on narrow screens without JavaScript is done with a checkbox and a label, which assistive software reports as a checkbox rather than a menu that expands. The same links sit in the footer, and that is the detour until the markup gets rebuilt.
- There is no skip link. Main content sits inside a proper landmark, so anything navigating by landmarks arrives there directly. Someone tabbing with sight, though, walks the header links before reaching an article, every time. It is on the list for the next template revision.
When something on the site blocks you
Email help@artisticplumbing.net. Put accessibility in the subject so nobody mistakes the note for a plumbing question. A report gets acted on faster when it carries:
- the page it happened on, pasted straight from the address bar;
- the task in progress at the time, and the moment it broke down;
- the software in play, meaning the browser and whatever assistive tool you rely on, with versions if they are easy to find.
Written reports get written answers, on the same two to four business day clock the rest of the inbox runs on, and sooner where a barrier is blocking the call button. Anything reproducible is scheduled into the next release, and a line above that a repair turns false is corrected in that same release. What you send stays only as long as the problem does.
Reaching the same information by voice
The number printed across the site, (800) 555-0142, belongs to a plumbing line rather than to the people who edit these pages. Dial it about a leak and the plumber answering handles slab work every week, at whatever hour, and will walk you through the meter test, the repair options and the going rates out loud. Plenty of readers find that quicker than any table.
Two limits on that route. Barriers cannot be logged through it, since the plumber answering has no access to these pages and no channel back to the editors, which is why such reports have to be written.
Nor is that plumber part of this publication. The site publishes and nothing more: no plumbing license attached to the name, nobody dispatched to a driveway. Should scheduled work come out of a call, a referral fee reaches the publisher from that partner, settled between the two businesses afterward, with nothing added to your quote to cover it. The full arrangement is described on how the phone line is paid for.
Revisions
Every new component is tabbed through, zoomed and contrast checked before it reaches a live page, which is why the open list runs to five entries and not twenty. This statement gets edited whenever a site change makes one of its lines untrue. The remaining conditions attached to your visit are in the site terms.