Accessibility
How accessible Nova is
We are working to WCAG 2.2 level AA. This page says what has been done, how it was checked, and what is still not right. The last part is the part worth reading.
What works
- Keyboard. Every control can be reached and operated with Tab, Enter and Space. 173 controls that were mouse-only were fixed.
- Dialogs. All 41 announce themselves as dialogs, take focus when they open, keep Tab inside while they are open, close with Escape, and return focus to whatever opened them.
- Form labels. 63 fields that had only a placeholder now have a real label. A placeholder is not a label; it vanishes the moment you type.
- Touch targets are at least 44×44 pixels, above the 24×24 the standard asks for, because that is what a phone actually needs.
- Reduced motion. If your device asks for reduced motion, animations are removed rather than shortened. For some people they are a migraine or vestibular trigger, and this app is used by people who are already unwell.
- Zoom. Pinch-to-zoom works. It had been disabled by a single line in the page settings, which is a serious barrier for anyone with low vision.
- Announcements. Saving and loading are announced to a screen reader, not only shown.
How it was tested
An automated audit drives a real browser and runs axe-core against every screen while signed in, at phone size. It fails the build on any violation. A real browser was used deliberately rather than a simulated one, because a simulated browser cannot judge colour contrast, focus order or whether something is genuinely visible.
That audit found 33 failures on its first run and 4 on its last. Everything it found was fixed except one, below.
What is not right yet
Stated plainly, because you may run into these.
One known AA failure
The subtitle inside the app’s coral banner is white on coral at 13px, which measures 3.11:1 where 4.5:1 is required. Fixing it means either darkening the signature banner or making the subtitle considerably larger. Both are design decisions rather than defects, so it is being left to a designer rather than patched. It is a known and accepted deviation, not an oversight.
Not tested with a real screen reader
VoiceOver and NVDA behave differently from what the underlying code suggests. The automated audit cannot stand in for a person actually using one, and that testing has not happened yet. If you use a screen reader and something is wrong, please tell us, because right now you will find it before we do.
17 fields still need a label
These had no placeholder text to derive one from, so each needs a label chosen deliberately. The automated audit does not flag them, which is exactly why they are listed here.
Focus order and markup
Focus order has been checked inside dialogs but not audited across whole screens. And 95 controls behave correctly as buttons without being written as buttons, which works but is not ideal.
Tell us
If something is unusable for you, write to support@heynova.org and say what it was and which screen. We treat it as a bug, not as a request. If you tell us what assistive technology you use, that helps us reproduce it.
If we have not put it right and you want to take it further, in the UK you can contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service.