Accessibility Statement

Syntax Hive wants everyone to be able to read what we publish and to reach us, whatever device, browser or assistive technology they use. We treat accessibility as part of engineering rather than as a clean-up pass at the end of a project, because a problem introduced in a component is cheapest to fix in that component.

This statement applies to the Syntax Hive website at syntaxhive.com, including every page served from that domain. It sets out the standard we aim for, what we have actually built, what we have not yet verified, and how to tell us when we have got something wrong.

We wrote this statement ourselves. It describes the state of the site on the date shown above, and we revise it when the site changes or when a reported barrier teaches us something.

The standard we hold ourselves to is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.2 at Level AA. WCAG is also the basis of the European harmonised standard EN 301 549, which is why most accessibility regulations converge on the same success criteria.

We consider this site partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Partially conformant means most of the site meets the standard, but some content — described under known limitations below — does not yet fully meet it. We have chosen the honest label rather than the flattering one.

We will say so here if that changes. Until then, please read every statement below as our own account of our own work.

The following measures are implemented across the site rather than on selected pages:

• Full keyboard operability. Every interactive element can be reached and used without a mouse or a touchscreen.
• A visible focus indicator on every interactive element, so keyboard users can always see where they are.
• A “Skip to content” link as the first focusable element on every page, so keyboard and screen-reader users can bypass the navigation.
• Semantic landmarks — header, navigation, main and footer — so assistive technology can move through a page by region.
• Exactly one h1 per page and no skipped heading levels, so the heading outline works as a table of contents.
• Decorative visuals are marked aria-hidden and are not announced, so they do not clutter the reading order.
• Animated headings expose their full text to assistive technology rather than fragmenting it word by word.
• The custom cursor and other pointer-driven effects are disabled entirely on touch devices, where they have no meaning.
• Motion respects the operating-system reduced-motion setting throughout — described in detail in the next section.
• No third-party analytics, advertising or tracking scripts run on any page, and the fonts are served from this site’s own domain, so nothing outside our control can alter the reading experience.

None of this is remarkable. It is the baseline, and we list it only so a reader can check our claims against what they actually experience.

This site uses a lot of motion. Motion can be genuinely disabling — it triggers nausea, dizziness and migraine for people with vestibular conditions — so it gets a section of its own rather than a bullet point.

If your operating system is set to reduce motion, the site reads that preference and honours it everywhere. You do not need to configure anything here; we follow the setting you have already made, and the site applies it from the very first frame it renders rather than starting an animation and then cancelling it.

• Motion collapses to opacity-only transitions rather than being switched off. Travel, scale and blur are dropped; the fade that signals a state change is kept, so you can still tell that something has appeared, changed or been dismissed.
• Smooth scrolling is switched off completely. Under reduced motion we never take over your scroll wheel — the page scrolls exactly as your browser and operating system intend, because hijacking scroll is precisely the kind of motion that setting is asking us not to do.
• Ambient background layers stop animating and hold a single static state instead of flickering.
• Pointer-driven effects — the custom cursor, magnetic buttons and anything else that follows the mouse — are disabled under reduced motion, and are disabled on touch devices regardless of the setting.
• The preference is tracked live. If you change the system setting while the site is open, the site follows it without a reload.

We would rather list our gaps than let you find them. These are the limitations we are aware of on the date shown above.

No independent audit

Our conformance claim has not been checked by an external auditor or accessibility specialist. Self-assessment reliably misses the problems the assessor did not think to look for, so treat our claim as a considered account rather than a verified result.

Text inside product screenshots

Some case studies illustrate the work with screenshots of the product we built. Each image carries an alt attribute describing what it shows, but the text rendered inside the screenshot itself is not machine-readable: it cannot be read by a screen reader, resized independently or recoloured by your browser. Where a screenshot carries information that matters, we describe it in the surrounding prose as well — but we have not yet done that consistently across every case study.

Third-party sites we link to

Case studies link out to live client sites and other external pages. Those sites are outside our control and we make no accessibility claim about them. If a link takes you somewhere unusable we would still like to know, because we can at least describe the destination better on our side.

Newly published content

We publish case studies and articles on an ongoing basis. Material added after the date at the top of this statement is written against the same criteria, but it is reviewed after publication rather than before it, so a recent page may carry a problem an older one does not.

If you find something that is not on this list, it is an oversight rather than a gap we were comfortable with. Please tell us.

The site is built against current versions of the major desktop and mobile browsers, and is developed and reviewed using keyboard-only navigation together with the accessibility tooling those browsers provide.

We want to be modest about the limits of that. We have not carried out systematic testing across every combination of screen reader, browser and operating system, and we do not claim the site has been verified with any particular assistive technology. A report from someone using a specific setup is worth more to us than any amount of internal checking, which is why the next section matters more than this one.

The site does not require a browser extension and does not ask you to install anything in order to read it.

If any part of this site stops you doing what you came to do, please tell us. We treat accessibility reports as bug reports rather than as complaints, and we would much rather hear about a small annoyance than have you quietly work around it.

We aim to respond to every report within five working days. That response will either explain the fix, give you a realistic date for it, or set out another way to get the information or finish the task in the meantime. If a fix will take longer than a few weeks we will say so, rather than going quiet.

Anything you can tell us from the list below helps us reproduce the problem. Please do not wait until you have all of it — a one-line report is far better than no report.

Where it happened

The address of the page, or a description of how you got there.

What you were trying to do

The task in your own words — read a case study, submit the contact form, reach the navigation.

What happened instead

What you saw, heard, or could not reach, and what you expected to happen at that point.

Your setup

Browser and version, operating system, and any assistive technology and its version. Whether you have reduced motion or an increased text size enabled is often the detail that explains everything.

You can send this by email using the contact details below, or through the form at /contact. That form is keyboard-operable and every field is labelled — but if it is the form itself that is blocking you, please email us instead.

If you contact us about an accessibility barrier and are not satisfied with our response — or if we fail to respond at all — you may escalate the matter to the body responsible for enforcing accessibility requirements in your jurisdiction.

We have deliberately not named an authority here. Which body is competent depends on where this website is operated from and where you are, and the operator’s registered details are still being finalised. Those details are published on our Imprint page at /imprint, which also names any statutory information that is still outstanding. Naming a plausible-sounding authority we had not confirmed would send you to the wrong place, which is worse than asking you to look it up.

Accessibility feedback, questions about this statement, and requests for content in an alternative format all go to the same place.

If you need something on this site in a different format — a case study as plain text, for example — ask, and we will send it. There is no charge, and you do not need to explain why.