Accessibility statement

We build and test hardymarks.com against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the standard most accessibility law in the US points to. In practice that means text with enough contrast to read, every control reachable and operable from the keyboard, form fields that are labelled and errors that say what to fix, and pages that hold together when you zoom in or shop on a narrow phone screen.

WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA has 50 success criteria. Eight of them don't apply here, since there is no video or audio on the storefront, nothing runs on a timer, and there are no motion or single-key controls. Of the 42 that do apply, the store meets 41 and partly meets one.

The one is alt text on product photographs. Alt text is the written description a screen reader reads aloud in place of an image. Every photo in the store has one now, so no image is silent, but most of that text is generated from the book's title: you hear the title and the position in the gallery rather than a description of what the photograph actually shows. Written descriptions of the covers, interior spreads and back covers are being drafted and will replace the generated text as they are approved.

Checkout runs on Shopify's own hosted pages, which a shop owner cannot modify. Shopify publishes its own accessibility conformance report for checkout. The newsletter popup and the spam-protection badge are third-party components too. We have tested how both behave inside the page, and fixed what we could reach from the theme, but we don't control what they render.

Automated scans with axe-core covered 21 pages and interactive states at both desktop and 320px phone width, 40 scans in total. By hand we tabbed through every page, opened and closed every drawer and modal with the keyboard, checked the layout at 320px and again with WCAG text-spacing overrides applied, measured the contrast of text sitting over photographs pixel by pixel, read through the theme code behind the header, product, collection, cart, search and contact pages, and audited the alt text across the whole catalogue.

The last full assessment was October 5, 2026. This statement was written October 8, 2026. One piece of testing is still outstanding: a full screen reader pass with VoiceOver on Mac and iPhone, which is where real-world problems tend to surface. We re-test the store after any theme change or app install and review this page when we do.

If something here stopped you from finding or buying a book, we want to know. Email orders@hardymarks.com with "Accessibility" in the subject line. Tell us the page you were on and what happened, and if you know the browser or assistive technology you were using, include that too. A person reads every one of these and you'll hear back within a few business days.

If the site itself is the obstacle, say which book you want and we will take the order over email.