Cherub Design

The person who builds it is the person who tests it.

I’m Adam. Most people building small business websites arrive from design or from marketing. I arrived from testing, ten years of being the one who finds what everybody else missed, which is an unusual route in, and the reason this site keeps showing you measurements instead of adjectives.

Discipline
Software engineering
Specialism
Quality & accessibility
Certification
ISTQB Advanced Level
Based
Chepstow, Monmouthshire

Where this comes from

Most recently as a senior QA engineer, for companies ranging from a dozen people to the FTSE 100, which in practice means finding the problems that survive everyone else’s good intentions: the edge case nobody thought of, the journey that works perfectly right up until a real customer takes it. I hold ISTQB Advanced Level certification in both Test Manager and Test Analyst, which certifies the habit the job is actually made of: assuming nothing works until somebody has checked.

Almost nobody building small business websites has that background. Agencies quote independent businesses thousands for the testing, or skip it and hope, or decline the work altogether because a four-page site is not worth their attention. One person doing the whole job is how you fix that. No margin going to account management, and nobody standing between you and whoever is actually building it.

What that changes

Testing is not a stage at the end that gets cut when the deadline moves. Every page is used without a mouse, blown up to four times the text size, and squeezed onto a screen the width of a small phone. Every colour pairing is calculated rather than judged by eye, because judging it by eye is how sites end up with grey text nobody over fifty can read.

Anything I find, you hear about in plain English. A finding that cannot be explained to the person who has to act on it is not a finished finding, and that applies to the things I get wrong as much as the things you asked for. If I have broken something, you will be told before you notice.

Plenty of tools will generate you a website now. None of them will tell you whether the result actually works, and that is the part I was trained for.

Here is what that looks like in practice. There is a great deal of misleading marketing about accessibility law, and a lot of it is used to sell websites. The honest version costs me work. It is below anyway.

  • The Equality Act 2010 applies

    Service providers must make reasonable adjustments so disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage. A website counts as a service.

  • But it names no standard

    The Act does not mention WCAG. There is no compliance deadline attached to it, and no fine attached to it.

  • The 2018 Regulations are not about you

    They do name WCAG and do require a statement, but they apply to public sector bodies. If you run a private business, they do not apply.

  • Enforcement against small businesses is rare

    The Equality and Human Rights Commission has limited capacity and does not go looking for small websites to prosecute.

If anyone tells you a fine is imminent, or a deadline is about to pass, they are selling you something.

WCAG 2.2 AA is worth aiming for anyway. It is the clearest existing definition of "reasonable", and meeting it makes the site better for everyone. The real cost of an inaccessible site is the custom you never hear about: around one in five UK adults is disabled, and almost none of them will contact you to complain that your booking form is unusable.

I am a software engineer, not a solicitor. Nothing here is legal advice. If you need a view on your obligations, take it from a qualified lawyer.

This site

Plain HTML and one stylesheet. No framework, no build step to deploy, and no JavaScript, because nothing here needs any. Every dependency is another thing that can break, slow the page down, or stop being maintained.

Every colour pairing has been measured against WCAG 2.2 AA and the figures are recorded at the top of the stylesheet, so they can be re-checked rather than taken on trust. What has been done and what has not is on the accessibility statement.

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