Accessibility
The build target here is WCAG 2.2, Level AA. A target rather than a claim: no independent auditor has walked through this site, so nothing here is a certification or a warranty. It is a list of build decisions, each checked by hand, each open to correction by a reader who hits one that fails.
Conditions matter as much as code here. Pages about boilers get opened in a cooling house well after midnight, on a phone held in gloved hands, in a basement with one bar of signal. A layout that only behaves on a big screen in a warm room is no use.
The number has to be reachable before anything else
A visitor with no heat needs one thing from the site and the rest can wait, so the phone link is built to survive every way people navigate. The header sits first in the page source and stays pinned as you scroll. Inside it the number is an ordinary link with the digits written out as text, not baked into a picture and not tucked behind an icon, which makes it the second stop of the Tab key on every page and lets screen reader software read it aloud digit by digit. Enter dials it.
On narrow screens a second call bar is fixed along the bottom edge. That bar comes last in the source on purpose: it is there for a thumb, while a keyboard or a screen reader reaches the header link far sooner.
Nothing stands in front of the page meanwhile: no overlay, no consent wall, no newsletter box. Switch JavaScript off and the number still sits there and still dials.
What the pages are made of
Structure is plain HTML doing its own job: a single H1 on each page, then headings ordered so that no level gets skipped, real landmarks around the banner, the navigation, the article and the footer, so assistive software moves between them in a keystroke.
An anchor has to still mean something once it is lifted away from its sentence, which is why one here reads like the no heat checklist for a boiler and never click here. Alt text names what a photograph shows: rust crusted under a section, a gauge needle below 12 psi, a stain spreading beneath a circulator.
Data tables carry header cells and sit in a container with its own sideways scroll, so a wide price grid slides across without dragging the article along. Questions at the foot of a page are headings with the answer printed underneath, nothing to expand and nothing that can stay shut. Contents lists on long pages use the browser's own disclosure element, opened with Enter or Space.
Where JavaScript runs, two small scripts do minor work that nothing depends on: counting visits, and dropping a nearby city name into labels beside the call button. Refuse both and the neutral wording stays put.
Measurements, not impressions
| Element | What was set |
|---|---|
| Focus indicator | A 3 pixel terracotta outline set 2 pixels clear of the element, on every link, button and control, never suppressed |
| Tap targets | Call buttons stand 48 pixels tall, easing to 44 on the narrowest handsets; menu links hold 44 |
| Text contrast | Ratios computed when the palette is built, not eyeballed: body text near 7:1 on its background, everything else above the 4.5:1 AA floor |
| Color alone | No warning, status or price is signaled by hue alone. Wording or an icon repeats it |
| Motion | One dot beside the call line pulses to show it is staffed, and holds still under reduced motion. No other animation, no sound |
| Zoom | Text scales to 200 percent and the column reflows in one direction, no fixed heights clipping paragraphs |
Four gaps that are still real
- Nothing jumps you past the header. Moving by landmarks lands on the article at once, but a keyboard user who can see the screen walks the header first, page after page. That shortcut belongs in the next template revision.
- The mobile menu control is announced wrong. Collapsing navigation without JavaScript takes a hidden checkbox and a label, so assistive software announces a checkbox where a menu button belongs. Until that markup is rebuilt, those links all sit in the footer too.
- Photo descriptions are thinner than they should be. Images here are generated, and so is the first draft of the text describing them, which an editor then tightens. Somebody studying the same frame would name more, so the paragraphs around a photograph carry that detail.
- Wide tables punish magnification. Cost grids of four or five columns already scroll sideways, and under heavy zoom the row label slides out of view partway across. If that grid defeats you, ask the desk and the figures behind replacement pricing come back as plain text in an email.
Reporting a barrier
Mail [email protected] with accessibility as the first word of the subject, which keeps the note clear of the heating questions. Three details make a report actionable: the page address, the task that broke under you, and the browser plus whatever assistive tool was running.
Answers come back on the desk's weekday clock, inside the same three working days the rest of the inbox gets. Anything blocking the route to the phone number jumps that queue the day it lands: in January that route is the point of the site. Reproducible problems go into the next release, and any sentence here the fix makes false is rewritten with it.
The same information without the screen
Dial (800) 555-0163 and a licensed heating contractor covering your part of the state answers, not the desk that writes these pages. Ask why a boiler will not fire, why a radiator stays cold, what a replacement runs, and the answer comes out loud from somebody who opens these systems every week.
Two limits apply. That contractor cannot log a site problem, having no access to what you are reading, which is why barrier reports have to come by email. Nor is the contractor part of this publication: Calderwick writes, holds no trade license and sends nobody to a driveway. Where such a call ends in scheduled work a referral fee reaches this desk from the contractor, nothing gets added to what you were quoted, and the full arrangement behind the phone line sits on its own page.
Keeping this page honest
Templates get a keyboard pass, a zoom pass and a contrast check before anything built on them goes live, which is why that list runs to four entries and not twenty. A site change that makes a sentence here untrue is a reason to edit it.