Accessibility

Clause 01Our commitment

Every person should be able to read this site, ask for help and reach us, including people who use a screen reader, magnification, voice control, a switch device or a keyboard alone, and people who need larger text, higher contrast or less motion. We treat accessibility as part of doing the job properly.

This matters more here than on most sites. People arrive at a restoration company at three in the morning with water coming through a ceiling. The website and the phone line are the two doors into this business and both of them have to be open to everyone.

Clause 02The standard we work to

This site is built and tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 at Level AA, published by the World Wide Web Consortium. That is the standard courts and the United States Department of Justice most often point to when deciding whether a business website is accessible under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination separately bars a place of public accommodation from discriminating against people with disabilities and names no technical web standard, and we treat WCAG 2.1 AA as the way to meet that duty online.

Meeting a standard is continuing work rather than a single event. Every new page, photograph and feature is checked against the two lists below before it goes live: what the site already does, and what we measure on the page before we publish it.

Clause 03What the site does today

• Every page opens with a visible skip to content link as the first thing a keyboard reaches.
• Headings run in a logical order on every page, so a screen reader user can move through a page by heading.
• Every link, button, form field, the chat panel, the consent slip and the accessibility menu can be reached and operated with the keyboard alone, in a sensible order, with a visible focus outline.
• Every image carries alternative text, which the build refuses to publish a page without. A decorative image is marked so that a screen reader skips it.
• Every form field carries a visible label, a required field is announced, and an error is described in words next to the field rather than by color alone.
• The site respects your device's reduced motion setting and stops decorative animation when it is on.
• The chat panel and the consent slip are announced to a screen reader and do not trap keyboard focus. Both close with the Escape key, except that the consent slip takes Escape only once you have answered it, because a slip that closed on Escape without an answer would read as an answer.
• A link to the phone number opens your dialer and a link to our email address opens your email app, so you can reach us the way that suits you.
• Nothing flashes, no video plays with sound on its own, and no action needs a precise gesture.
• Every page carries a language attribute so that a screen reader pronounces the text correctly.

Clause 04What we test before this site goes live

Two of the AA requirements are settled by the finished visual design rather than by the page markup, and the design is not finished. We state them here as what we test and hold the site to, not as a measurement we have already taken.

Both checks are repeated whenever the colors or the layout change, and the date of each check is recorded.

• Every text and background pair, every button and every form outline is measured against the WCAG AA contrast ratio of 4.5 to 1 for normal text and 3 to 1 for large text and interface elements, and a pair that misses is changed before the page is published.
• Every page is opened at 200 percent browser text size and at a 320 pixel width, and any content that is lost, any function that stops working and any sideways scrolling is fixed before the page is published.

Clause 05The accessibility menu

A button on every page opens a menu with six options: bigger text, high contrast, highlighted links, paused motion, a readable font and a big cursor. Your choices are saved in your own browser and are never sent to us, so every page opens the way you set it. The menu sits on top of a site that is already accessible rather than standing in for one, and every part of the site works without it.

Clause 06Known limitations

These are the gaps we know about.

If you find something that is not on this list, we want to hear about it.

• The before and after images describe a change that a photograph carries better than words do. Call us and a technician will describe any result in as much detail as you want.
• The chat panel answers from a fixed set of prepared answers and does not understand every question. Its answers are plain text and it works with a keyboard and a screen reader, and where it cannot help, the phone number is one tap away.
• Some pages we link to, such as our Google Business Profile, are run by other companies and their accessibility is not in our hands.
• Reviews quoted from Google appear as the customers wrote them, so the spelling and the punctuation are their own.

Clause 07How we test

Before a page goes live, and at least twice a year after that, we run an automated checker over every page and fix what it reports, walk every page and every form using the keyboard alone, read every page with a screen reader and check that the headings, the labels, the alternative text and the announcements make sense, check the color contrast with a contrast tool, and test on a phone with the text size at its largest setting and reduced motion turned on. We record the date of each check and what was fixed.

Clause 08If something is not working for you

Tell us. We will fix the problem, and while we are fixing it we will get you what you needed another way.

Tell us which page you were on, what you were trying to do, what went wrong, and which browser and assistive technology you were using if you know. We reply within two business days and we aim to fix a real barrier within ten business days. Where we cannot fix it that quickly we tell you why and give you a way around it in the meantime.

• Call (908) 520-8698. If you cannot use the site at all, call and we will take your request on the phone, describe anything on the site to you and send the written estimate by whichever method suits you.
• Write to privacy@dhlcarpetrestoration.com with the word Accessibility in the subject line.

Clause 09Formal complaints

If you believe we have not resolved an accessibility problem, you may raise it with the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights or with the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice. Please give us the chance to put it right first, and we take a complaint seriously either way.

Clause 10How to contact us

Accessibility questions and requests go to privacy@dhlcarpetrestoration.com, or call (908) 520-8698. This statement is reviewed whenever the site changes and at least once a year.