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Accessibility Statement

Last updated: September 8, 2026

A Crowded Galaxy is a reading site, and reading should not depend on how you read. We want everyone to be able to browse the catalogue, buy a book, and read it — including people using screen readers, keyboard-only navigation, magnifiers, or reduced-motion settings.

Our standard

We are working toward conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Level AA. This statement describes where we actually are, not where we would like to claim to be.

What works today

  • Keyboard: the comic reader's page turns, the panel-by-panel Cinematic mode, and site navigation operate from the keyboard. A "Skip to content" link is the first thing keyboard focus reaches on every page.
  • Flashing: the comic's panel lighting includes a flickering-tube effect on a few early pages. It is rate-limited where it is generated, to three flashes a second or fewer — the seizure-safety threshold — and that limit holds for every reader with nothing to switch on.
    • If we ever run the effect above that limit, the reader you meet on entering the comic will say so before you start reading, and will carry a switch to turn it off; the same switch stays in the Reading menu afterwards. Asking for reduced motion turns it off as well. We would rather tell you than let you find out.
  • Reduced motion: animations across the site honor your system's reduced-motion setting, including the unlock presentation and the backdrops. In the comic's Cinematic mode the camera still travels from panel to panel — that movement is how the page is read — but the decorative camera shake laid over it is reduced. Audio never plays until you start it.
  • Forms: sign-in, account, and purchase forms carry programmatic labels and announce their errors to assistive technology.
  • Contrast: our interface colour palette is checked against WCAG AA contrast thresholds by automated tests that run before every release, and a build check refuses new uses, on the pages we serve to readers, of the two grey tones we know fall below AA on this site's dark backgrounds. Neither check can look at a rendered screen, so individual screens can still fall outside the palette — we keep a list of the places that still do, and that list is only allowed to get shorter.

Known limitations

We would rather name these than pretend they don't exist:

  • Comic pages are pictures of words. The full text alternative — the authored script for each page, with dialogue and action — is being wired into the reader so that a page's text is reachable from the page itself. Until that ships, many comic pages do not yet have a text equivalent.
  • We do not describe the artwork panel-by-panel. The script conveys each page's dialogue and events; a visual description of composition and art style is a separate project we have not undertaken.
  • The game's 3D room view is visual. Everything the 3D view can do is also available in the game's text terminal. The terminal is a text stream with a text input, which is close to the right shape for a screen reader, but we have not yet made its output announce itself when the game answers, or given its command field a programmatic label, so it is not yet usable by ear.
  • Some staff-only administrative tools are built on third-party software whose markup we do not control.

Feedback

If you hit a barrier anywhere on this site, tell us — it genuinely helps, and a human reads every message:

zack@binderybooks.com

Please mention the page you were on and the assistive technology or input method you were using. We aim to respond within five business days.

Review

This statement is reviewed and updated as remediation work ships, and accessibility checks run automatically in our build pipeline on every change.

We have not yet run manual keyboard and screen-reader passes over the core journeys — sign-up, purchase, and reading. Automated checks catch a real class of problems and miss exactly the ones only a person actually using the site can find, so this is the largest gap in what we are able to tell you above. Putting those passes on a regular schedule is planned work, and we will say so here when they start.