Accessibility

What we have done to make this site usable however you browse it, what we know is still wrong, and how to tell us when we have missed something.

The standard we hold ourselves to

We aim at WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Every page has been checked against the criteria that can be measured — text contrast, form labelling, heading structure, target sizes, accessible names, page language — and, at the last review, passed them. This is a self-assessment by the people who built the site rather than an audit by an outside party, and it is worth reading it as such.

Keyboard

Everything works without a mouse. A skip link jumps straight past the navigation, focus is always visibly outlined, and nothing traps you. The Tuner's dials are ordinary range inputs: tab to one and the arrow keys move it, Home and End take it to its extremes, and the sky responds as you go.

Screen readers

The cosmos is drawn on a canvas, which no screen reader can describe, so it is marked as decorative and everything it means is also written down. The projected fate, the reason for it, the kind of universe you have made and its habitability are all text — and they are announced as you drag, because the whole point of the Tuner is finding out that the change you just made killed the universe. Each dial reads out its physical value and whether it is still inside the life-permitting window, rather than a meaningless slider position.

Motion

If your system asks for reduced motion, we honour it: the camera stops drifting on its own, transitions become instant, and the ambient animation across the site stops. The universe stays three-dimensional and fully explorable — it simply stops moving unless you move it. The ignition sequence can be paused, scrubbed or skipped outright at any point.

Colour and contrast

Body text sits at about 6.5:1 against the background and headings higher, comfortably past the 4.5:1 the standard asks for. Colour is never the only thing carrying a meaning: a universe's fate has a name and a sentence explaining it, not just a hue, and every dial says in words whether it is still inside its window, not only with a coloured dot.

Sound

The Tuner can play sound as a universe forms and dies. It is off until you turn it on, it can be muted at any time, and nothing anywhere on the site depends on hearing it — every sound is a second telling of something already on screen.

What we know is still wrong

We would rather name these than let you discover them. The cosmos is a visual experience at heart: we can tell you a universe collapsed, but not what the collapse looked like, and no text equivalent closes that gap honestly. The visual quality adapts to your device, so a slower machine sees a simpler sky than a fast one. Some pages carry long, dense physics prose that has not been through a plain-language pass. And nothing beyond the common screen readers has been tested against this site.

Tell us what we broke

If any part of this site shuts you out, we want to hear about it — the small things as much as the large ones. Write to us and say what you were trying to do, what happened, and what you were using. We read everything, and we will tell you what we can fix and when.

Last reviewed 16 August 2026, against WCAG 2.2 Level AA.