Accessibility

This site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA. That is a target, not a certificate: no formal audit has been carried out, so this page says what has been built and tested, and what is known to fall short.

What has been done

• Every page is ordinary HTML with headings in order, and works with JavaScript turned off. Four things on the site are interactive: the birth-date calculator, the tarot card search, the tarot draw and the birth-card tool. Where one cannot run, its page says so and gives the same answer another way: a link to every date of the year for the calculator, the full list of seventy-eight cards for the search and the draw, and a table of every total and its card for the birth card.
• Everything is reachable with a keyboard, in a sensible order, and the focused element always has a visible outline. Each page opens with a skip link to the main content.
• Nothing depends on colour alone. Where a table, a chart or the grid of dates marks something out in the accent colour, it is also set apart by hatching or a heavier weight, and the same thing is said in words beside it. On the page listing every date of the year, where the marked dates are explained above the grid, each marked date's own label says it too, so a screen reader announces that the sign on that date depends on the year and the hour.
• Text reflows to a single column and stays readable when zoomed to 400% or at a 320 pixel width. No page scrolls sideways as a whole; the wide data tables have a scroll region of their own, which is listed under the shortcomings below.
• Light and dark are both supported and follow your system setting. Both were checked for contrast against the text sizes actually used.
• Illustrations carry alt text describing what is drawn. Decorative marks — the icons beside a heading, the faint sky behind the page — are hidden from screen readers rather than announced, because naming them adds noise and no information.
• Every field in the four tools has a label, including the time-of-birth field and the time-zone list that the calculator shows only on a day the sun changed sign. The calculator announces its result politely when it changes, and does not interrupt you mid-sentence or repeat itself when nothing has changed; on a day the sun changed sign, the result says so and gives the moment. The birth-card tool works the same way.
• The card search's filter buttons say which one is pressed, and the number of matching cards is reported as a status message as you type. The draw is an ordinary form, a labelled choice of spread and a button, and the spread it deals is read out when it appears.
• Nothing flashes, autoplays, loops or scrolls on its own, so there is nothing to pause and nothing that can trigger a seizure. The one piece of motion on the site is a 320 millisecond fade, card by card, as a tarot spread you asked for is dealt; it runs once, only on your own action, and is switched off entirely if your system asks for reduced motion.

Known shortcomings

These are real and listed rather than quietly left out.

• The wide data tables scroll sideways on a phone. The tables of years, weekdays and notable births and deaths are genuinely two-dimensional and are given a horizontal scroll region rather than being reshaped. The region is keyboard-scrollable and labelled, but it is still a sideways scroll inside the page.
• The charts are images with a text description, not data tables. The ecliptic wheel, the drift chart, the lunar-new-year band and the generation timeline each carry a written summary of what they show, which a screen reader reads in place of the picture. The figures behind them are also given in words or in a table: the wheel's summary gives the range of the sun's position in degrees, every year's crossing is in a table under the drift chart, the lunar-new-year band's summary gives the earliest and latest dates it plots with a table of new-year dates on the same page, and each generation's years are in a table on the generations page, while a year page names its own generation in words. Those are read in a different place from the picture, not alongside it.
• A tarot spread is read out whole. When the draw deals, the whole spread is announced at once, which for the ten cards of the Celtic Cross is long. It can be stopped in the usual way, and the cards stay on the page to be read at your own pace.
• No formal audit and no assistive-technology test matrix. Testing has been by keyboard, by zoom, by contrast measurement and with the system screen reader. It has not been tested across a range of screen readers and browsers.

Standards and law

The target is WCAG 2.2 AA. This site is operated from South Africa, where the relevant obligations arise under the Constitution and the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act rather than under a web-specific statute. WCAG 2.2 is the current version of the guidelines, and content that meets it also meets the earlier versions the rules elsewhere still name. The US Section 508 standards incorporate WCAG 2.0 AA. The European standard EN 301 549 is built on WCAG 2.1 AA in the version the EU currently cites, v3.2.1; its successor, v4.1.1, published in September 2026, moves to WCAG 2.2 but has not yet been cited in the EU's Official Journal. The UK's public-sector regulations rest on the same European standard, and the UK government's guidance now asks public-sector sites for WCAG 2.2 AA. Meeting 2.2 AA is therefore the most useful thing a site like this can do.

If something does not work

Please say so — a specific report is worth more than a general one. Tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and what happened, along with the browser and any assistive technology you were using. Write to hello@birthalmanac.com.

There is no formal complaints procedure and no enforcement body to escalate to for a private site of this kind. What there is: the report will be read, and anything that can be fixed will be.