Accessibility statement

What we're aiming for

Mile aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at Level AA across madeitlookeasy.co.uk. Accessibility is treated as an acceptance criterion for each page rather than a pass at the end: a page isn't finished until it clears the checks below.

What we are not claiming: Level AAA conformance across the site, and no third-party audit or certification has been carried out. Many individual colour pairs in the palette do exceed AAA — that is a consequence of how the tokens were chosen, not a site-wide claim. Where we fall short, it is listed under known exceptions below.

How we test

• Automated, per section. axe-core, driven by Playwright in headless Chrome, runs against real rendered pages — the homepage, the work index and a case study, the articles index and an article, the services hub and every service page, and this page along with the About and privacy pages. The rule set is WCAG 2.0/2.1 A and AA plus axe's best-practice rules, and every one of those runs has to come back clean before a change can be merged.
• One deliberate exception to that. The internal component kitchen sink — a development page, not part of the site — is audited by the same tooling but reported rather than enforced. Two component variants there have open contrast findings we have chosen not to paper over, listed under known exceptions below; the page also trips rules that only fire because it puts every component on one screen at once, such as repeated landmark regions and a focus guard inside a demo dialog. Neither the page nor those two variants is reachable from this site.
• Both themes, every time. Each pass runs twice, once with the light theme and once with dark, because the two token sets are different colours and a fix in one is not a fix in the other.
• Reduced motion. A separate pass loads pages withprefers-reduced-motion: reduce and asserts that nothing is left hidden by a scroll animation and that the animated hero background is genuinely switched off — not merely slowed down.
• Interactive states, not just the page at rest. The kitchen-sink pass audits the page with dialogs open in both themes and with a navigation menu open, and it compares computed colours against the design tokens so contrast cannot drift silently.
• Manual review at each milestone. The WAVE browser extension and a keyboard-only pass. Automated tools cannot judge whether alt text is meaningful, whether focus order makes sense, or whether a heading structure describes the page — those need a person, so a person does them.

What we commit to

• Anything you can do with a mouse, you can do with a keyboard. Every hover state has a matching:focus-visible state that reveals the same information — case-study cards, service rows, navigation menus, footer links. There is a skip link to the main content on every page, menus close on Escape, and focus returns to the control that opened them.
• Motion is optional. If your system asks for reduced motion, the scroll reveals, the animated hero and the reading progress bar do not run at all; the content is simply present.
• Pointer effects never carry meaning. The hero's particle field responds only to a fine pointer such as a mouse or trackpad; on touch and other coarse pointers it isn't interactive. Cursor and pointer effects never replace the native cursor, and no state is ever communicated by the cursor alone.
• Contrast is computed, not eyeballed. Every colour pair is calculated against the WCAG formula before it ships, and the palette holds two separate border tokens so that boundaries which carry meaning — input outlines, focus rings, control edges — clear 3:1 on their own account. The lightest body text we use measures 5.99:1 against the dark background and 8.91:1 against the light one.
• Structure over decoration. One h1 per page, heading levels that don't skip, real landmarks, visible labels on form fields (never a placeholder standing in for a label), and alt text that describes the image rather than repeating the client's name.
• Text stays text. Type is self-hosted and rendered as real text, so it can be zoomed, restyled or read aloud. Nothing that matters is baked into an image.

Known exceptions

Three, all deliberate, all stated here rather than left for you to find.

Gradient accent text in display headings

The final word of the hero heading, and of the closing call to action, is filled with the brand gradient. Across its first glyphs that gradient measures around 2.2:1 against the backdrop — below the 3:1 minimum that applies even to large text. It is a brand decision taken knowingly: the type is display size (44px and up), the rest of the heading sits at full contrast, and the accent is real text rather than an image, so it is selectable, zoomable and read out in full by a screen reader. Nothing is available only inside the gradient. It stays under review, and if we find a treatment that keeps the brand moment and clears 3:1, it changes.

Decorative dividers below 3:1

The hairline rules between sections deliberately sit below 3:1. WCAG 1.4.11 applies to boundaries that carry information — input outlines, focus indicators, the edges of controls — and those use a separate, darker token that clears 3:1 in both themes. The section rules are decoration; holding them to a threshold they are not subject to would change the design and gain nobody anything.

Two component variants in the internal kitchen sink

The component library's development page carries two variants that fail AA and are not yet used anywhere on this site: a link-style button on a dark panel measuring 2.99:1, and a tinted destructive button measuring 4.41:1, both against 4.5:1. They are tracked as open rather than quietly fixed or quietly excluded, and neither appears on a page you can reach from the navigation. If either variant ships to a real page, it clears AA first.

Tell us if something doesn't work

If any part of this site gets in your way, email hello@madeitlookeasy.co.uk. Tell us the page and what happened — "the focus outline disappears on the services list in dark mode" is more useful than "it's broken", but either is welcome, and so is a report from an assistive technology we haven't tested with.

A person reads every message and you will get a reply within two working days. If it is a genuine barrier we will agree a fix with you, and where the fix will take time we will find another way to get you what you needed in the meantime.

This statement covers madeitlookeasy.co.uk. It was last reviewed on26 July 2026 and is updated whenever the site changes materially.