Accessibility

Our commitment

Verbum Domini is built to work for as many people as possible, including blind visitors using a screen reader. That isn’t a box we ticked once; we keep checking as the site grows.

What’s supported

• Accessibility settings: open them from the gear icon at the top of any page. There are ready-made profiles for motor impairment, blindness, colour blindness and dyslexia, plus individual switches: higher contrast, lower saturation, bigger text, wider letter and line spacing, highlighted links, the Lexend typeface (designed for easier reading) and a bigger cursor. Your choices are remembered, and "Reset All Settings" puts everything back.
• Read-aloud helper: turn on "Screen Reader" in the settings and the site reads out whatever you point at or reach with the keyboard, using your browser’s built-in speech. It doesn’t replace a real screen reader (VoiceOver, NVDA or TalkBack), and you don’t need it with one: the site already works with them through a clear heading order, landmarks (menu, main content, footer) and spoken updates for search results and live areas like "today’s saint".
• Keyboard: menus, search, settings and every popup open and close with the keyboard alone, and you can always see where the focus is. In the top menus on a computer, Enter opens a menu, Tab and the arrow keys move through it, and Escape closes it.
• Touch screens: on a tablet, the first tap on a menu item with a sub-menu opens the sub-menu; the second tap opens the page.
• Skip to content: every page starts with a hidden "Skip to content" link that jumps past the menu.
• Reduced motion: if "reduce motion" is on in your system settings, the site turns off non-essential animations. Section drawings that normally draw themselves as you scroll simply appear finished.
• Drawings: the line drawings next to sections are decoration only. Screen readers skip them, and nothing important is in them.
• Contact form: every field has a visible label, and screen readers announce whether your message went through. Turnstile, the spam check, usually works invisibly and only shows a one-click box when it has to.
• Dark and light themes: pick whichever is easier on your eyes; the site remembers.
• Colour contrast: text colours aim for the contrast ratios in WCAG 2.2 AA, and "Increase Contrast" in the settings pushes them further.

Known limitations

One person writes and maintains this site, and it hasn’t had a formal accessibility audit. Everything above was built with WCAG 2.2 AA in mind, and every page is tested automatically (axe) on desktop and mobile, in both themes. That isn’t a certificate, though, and things slip through. If you find one, please tell us.

Found a problem?

If something doesn’t work with your screen reader, a colour is hard to read, or you can’t reach something with the keyboard, write to us through the Contact page. Tell us which page, which device and which assistive technology you were using, and we’ll find it much faster.