Accessibility · last reviewed 30 August 2026
Accessibility statement
Playway Books Pvt Ltd publishes a book that a child uses with their hands and a parent marks at the kitchen table. A website for it that some people cannot use would be an odd thing to build. This page says how far we have got, how we know, and what we have not checked.
Where the site stands
This site is built to WCAG 2.2, Level AA. We know of no place where it fails that standard. But an absence of known failures is not the same as a completed evaluation, and three things on the list below have never been put in front of a person who relies on them — so the honest status is partially conformant: measured where it can be measured, untested where it cannot.
Some of the choices go past AA on purpose. Every control — the tokens and slots of Token Play, the buttons, and every field in the schools form — is at least 44 by 44 pixels with eight pixels between adjacent ones, which is the AAA threshold and also what a punch-out token feels like under a child’s finger. Links inside a sentence, in the navigation and in the footer are not: they are set at the height of the text around them, between 23 and 25 pixels, which meets AA under the exception SC 2.5.8 makes for a target sized by the line-height of the text it sits in. Token Play is built tap-to-place first with dragging added on top, because a game that only works by dragging fails outright for anyone who cannot drag.
What is measured, on every build
Five gates run before anything ships, and none of them is a score out of a hundred. Each either passes or stops the build.
| Checked | How | Criterion |
|---|---|---|
| Reflow, at three widths in both themes | Every page is rendered at 320, 768 and 1440 pixels, in the light and the dark theme, and the body is asserted never to scroll sideways. | SC 1.4.10 |
| Layout shift on a slow connection | Every page is loaded at 390 pixels wide over a throttled connection and its Cumulative Layout Shift recorded. The build fails above 0.1. This is the check that catches text moving under a reader as the typefaces arrive. | SC 2.2.2 (in spirit) |
| Text zoom to 200 per cent | The home page is rendered at 200 per cent text size and checked for horizontal scroll. Nothing on the site is sized in pixels except borders and token diameters. | SC 1.4.4 |
| A complete round of Token Play on the keyboard alone | The gate plays a full round using only Tab and Enter, then asserts that each token really sits inside the slot it was dropped into, that no slot is a button inside a button, and that the live region announced a spoken name rather than the letters. | SC 2.5.7, SC 2.1.1 |
| The page under reduced motion | Rendered with prefers-reduced-motion set, and asserted to have no transitions still running. Nothing on this site animates on scroll in the first place. | SC 2.3.3 |
| Every colour actually painted | Each rendered page reports the computed colour of every text, background and border it paints, and each one is checked against the values the design system has. A fourth colour anywhere fails the build. | SC 1.4.1 |
| Document structure | One h1 per page, no skipped heading levels, one primary action per page, and no link that opens a new tab without rel="noopener". | SC 1.3.1, SC 2.4.6 |
| Every contrast ratio in the system | All of them are recomputed from the hex values on every run — text on both grounds, the token fills, the labels on them, the borders, the amber button and each title colour, in both themes — rather than recorded once and trusted. | SC 1.4.3, SC 1.4.11 |
| Fourteen design rules that carry access requirements | Among them: a focus ring that has been removed or overridden, the hairline used as a control border where 3:1 is required, a hand-typed Unicode subscript in place of real notation, type sized in pixels, and anything animating on scroll. | SC 1.4.11, SC 2.4.13 |
The decisions underneath
- Nothing is signalled by colour alone. This site has no success green and no error red — both of those are chemical notation here, and a red error message beside a red element token would teach a student exactly the wrong thing. States are carried by a rule, a word and weight.
- The focus ring is never removed. It is an ink ring, a white gap, then an ink ring again, so one of the two always stands out against whatever is behind it. The header is capped at 60 pixels and every anchor target is offset beneath it, so focus never lands underneath the bar.
- It works without JavaScript. The mobile menu is a native disclosure element. The schools enquiry form submits and redirects on its own. Token Play is the only thing that needs scripting, and it is an enhancement, not a route.
- Wide content scrolls inside itself. The board inventories and the syllabus mapping are real tables with captions and scoped headers, each in its own scrolling container, so the page never scrolls sideways and the table can still be read.
- Text can be re-spaced. No text container has a fixed height, so line height, word spacing and letter spacing can all be forced without anything clipping.
- Chemical notation is set properly. Real subscript and superscript elements, never Unicode subscript characters, which screen readers handle unreliably and most fallback fonts do not carry. The three typefaces are self-hosted for the same reason — the reaction arrow is absent from the subsets a font CDN serves.
- The form asks in the open. Labels sit above fields and are never placeholders, hints are permanent rather than tooltips, and an error is named in words and tied to its field. The confirmation step shows what you entered rather than asking for it again.
- Help is in the same place on every page. Phone, WhatsApp and email, in that order, in the footer, on every page of the site.
- There are no cookies, no analytics and no advertising tags. Nothing tracks you, and there is no consent banner to dismiss before you can read anything.
What has not been tested by a person
This is the part of an accessibility statement worth reading. A build gate proves a keyboard path works; it cannot prove it makes sense.
- Nobody has read this site with a screen reader.
- Focus order, and whether a chemical formula is announced in a way that teaches anything, are not arithmetic and cannot be settled by a build gate. A pass with NVDA and with VoiceOver is still outstanding — nothing below replaces it. What has been checked, on 30 August 2026: the accessibility tree a screen reader actually reads from was pulled programmatically for a full keyboard round of Token Play. Each token announces its type before it is touched (“Calcium, element”; “Valency two, valency”; “Carbonate, radical”), each slot announces its state (“Empty element slot”, then “Calcium, element, placed in the element slot. Press Enter to take it back.”), and the live region announced “Calcium carbonate. That is a correct formula.” — the spoken name, not the letters. That confirms the underlying data is correct and well-formed; it does not confirm it sounds right, which only a person using a screen reader can.
- Most formulas outside the method pages carry no spoken name.
- A formula is given a spoken form — “calcium carbonate” rather than “C-A-C-O-three” — only where the site holds one. That covers the formulas the method pages set, and 46 of the 365 formulas on a board inventory page. The rest are announced character by character — confirmed directly on /syllabus/cbse/, where HCl and the first NaOH and NaCl carry no spoken label at all. The map is being extended; a wrong spoken name would be worse than none, so it is written by hand rather than generated.
- Nobody with a colour vision deficiency has read it.
- The design forbids colour as the only signal anywhere — the three token colours are near-identical in luminance, so every token carries its type as content, as form and as a written label as well. That is the right design; it has not been confirmed by a reader who needs it. What has been checked, on 30 August 2026: Token Play was rendered under Chromium’s own protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia emulation. Under achromatopsia — no colour information at all — the three tokens stayed unmistakable: a filled circle, a circle with a visible inner ring, a smaller mono digit, each with its type written underneath. That confirms the redundant signals hold under simulation; it is not the same as a genuinely colour-blind reader using the page, and the statement will keep saying so until one has.
- The photographs are not here yet.
- Fifteen places on this site render a ruled plate describing the photograph that belongs in it, rather than a picture. When the photography arrives each image needs a real alternative text written for it, and that work has not been done.
- The map on the contact page is somebody else’s.
- It is a Google embed, and it does not load until you press a button, so it is never on the page unless you ask for it. Its accessibility is not ours to guarantee. The address beside it is plain text, and the office can be rung.
- There has been no third-party audit.
- Everything above is a self-evaluation by the people who built the site.
Tell us if something does not work
If a page will not do what you need it to, we would rather hear it than not. Tell us which page and what happened, and if you can, what you were using to read it — that is usually the thing that lets us reproduce the problem. A person answers the phone from the Ernakulam office on weekdays: +91 484 2405580, WhatsApp +91 99471 23678, or learn@playwaybooks.com.
If you need something on this site in another form — a syllabus inventory as a plain document, a page read to you over the phone — ask, and we will send it.
This statement was prepared on 30 August 2026 by the people who built the site, using the automated evidence described above and a review of the code. It has not been audited by a third party. It is reviewed whenever the build gates change.