Accessibility

The standard we build to

This site is built to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That is a working floor rather than a badge: it has not been independently audited, and saying so is more useful to you than a compliance claim you cannot verify.

The one colour, and what it means

There is exactly one colour on this site besides ink and paper: a highlighter yellow. It is used for one thing and nothing else — to mark an absence. A scope nobody bought, a required form field, an error. The emphasis colour on this site marks nothing, literally.

And it is never the only signal. The void in a gap carries the word Nobody in full-size type, plus a screen-reader phrase saying "nobody bought this scope". A required field carries the word "required". An error carries its message in words. Remove every colour from this site and nothing becomes unreadable.

Ink on the highlighter measures 13.73:1, the strongest pairing anywhere on the site, which is correct: the void is the loudest thing on the page.

There is no red, no blue and no green anywhere, including in links, error states and focus rings.

Bid coverage is a number, not a colour

This deserves its own section because it is the decision a reader is most likely to assume we got wrong.

The coverage register could obviously have been colour-coded — green for crowded, amber for adequate, red for thin. It is not. A count is quantitative, and a number plus a noun ("2 bidders") carries the information exactly, in any medium, to any reader. Thin coverage additionally carries the word thin in a bordered label.

The result is a register that reads identically on screen, in black and white, in print, to a colour-blind reader and to a screen reader, with no legend to learn.

Struck text is struck, not greyed

An excluded scope is rendered with a strike-through rule and kept at full text contrast. It is never greyed out.

That is deliberate and it is an accessibility decision as much as a design one: the reader has to be able to read exactly what the bidder removed. Greying it would reduce contrast on the very text the page exists to make legible, and it would say "unimportant" when it means "deliberately not purchased".

Every struck scope also carries a screen-reader prefix reading "excluded:", so the meaning does not depend on the visual rule at all.

Colour and contrast elsewhere

Every text and background pairing was measured rather than eyeballed. Display ink measures 14.70:1 on the manila ground. Body text measures 9.73:1 on manila and 8.85:1 on the tint band. The muted grey used for secondary text measures 5.62:1 and 5.12:1, and is used only at body size and above.

The page ground is a warm manila rather than white, which some readers find easier on a long document and which keeps every ratio comfortably above the floor.

Keyboard

Everything interactive is reachable and operable from a keyboard in a sensible order. Focus is always visible: a two-pixel ink outline, offset, in one fixed colour that never changes meaning — deliberately not the highlighter, because the highlighter means absence.

A skip link to the main content is the first thing in the tab order on every page. The navigation on small screens opens from a real button with aria-expanded, and Escape closes it and returns focus to the button. Wide registers that scroll sideways become focusable regions so they can be scrolled with arrow keys, and only when they actually overflow.

Screen readers and structure

Every page has one h1 and a heading order that does not skip levels. Landmarks are real: a banner, a primary navigation with a label, a main region, and a footer navigation with its own label.

Every register is a real table with a caption, a header row and row headers. Units of measure sit in their own column rather than being jammed into the figure.

A gap is three labelled blocks in document order: the first trade and its exclusion, the void, the second trade and its exclusion, then the cost as a description list. Read linearly it makes the same argument the layout does.

The package numbers in the file margin are real text in document order, so a screen reader encounters the reference before the section it belongs to, exactly as a sighted reader does.

Motion

There is one authored animation: the highlighter is pulled across a void, once, over about four hundred milliseconds, the way a marker is drawn across a page. It happens once per gap and never repeats. Everything else is a short fade as a section scrolls into view.

If your system asks for reduced motion, all of it is switched off and the void is simply filled. Nothing loops, nothing auto-plays, nothing flashes at a rate that could trigger a seizure.

Without JavaScript

The whole site works. Every page renders, every register is a complete table, every void still reads Nobody in a filled cell, the questions open because they are native disclosure elements, the telephone number is a real link, the contact form submits and validates on the server, and the footer carries the complete navigation. JavaScript adds the mobile menu and the marker animation. Nothing depends on it.

Text, zoom and print

Everything is real text; there are no images of text anywhere, including in the registers. Type is sized in relative units so it follows your browser setting, and the layout holds at 200% zoom and at 400% in a single column without horizontal scrolling.

The coverage and budget pages are built to print, because somebody is going to take them into a meeting. In print the voids keep their fill where colour prints and gain a heavy outline where it does not, so a printer that drops colour still shows which scopes nobody bought.

What we have not done

We have not had an independent audit. We have not tested with every combination of screen reader and browser. There is no accessibility overlay or widget on this site, deliberately — those tend to interfere with the assistive technology you have already configured.

Telling us something is broken

Telephone (303) 986-4555, Mon–Fri 7:30 AM–4:30 PM MT. Or email [email protected]. Tell us the page and what happened, and what you were using if you know. We will fix it, and if a fix will take time we will tell you how to get the information another way meanwhile.

If something on this site is stopping you reading the coverage register, telephone and we will read it to you. The website is a convenience; the information is not locked inside it.