Accessibility

We build towards the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1, Level AA.

That is a goal, not a claim. No independent accessibility audit of GraceBook has been carried out. We would rather tell you that plainly than display a conformance badge we have not earned — if you rely on assistive technology, you have almost certainly been let down before by a site that claimed otherwise.

This list is deliberately specific. A vague statement that we are “committed to accessibility” would tell you nothing you could act on.

• Captions on mentor introduction videos are generated automatically and are not reviewed by a person. They will contain errors, particularly with names, religious vocabulary and accents. Occasionally they may fail to generate at all. No video is ever the only way to learn about a mentor — see below.
• Live sessions are not captioned. Video and audio sessions run through a third-party service, and we have not assessed its accessibility ourselves. A text-based session is available as an alternative and is chosen in the same place as any other session type.
• Keyboard navigation and colour contrast are unverified. We have not tested the whole site with a screen reader or against contrast requirements. Some of it may work well; we have not earned the right to say so.
• Some text is set at small sizes. Browser zoom works throughout, but we have not confirmed that every layout survives it intact.

Mentors may record a short introduction. These are optional for them and never the only way to learn about someone — every mentor also has a written biography covering their background, training and approach, along with their specialisations, languages and formation. Nothing in browsing or booking requires you to watch a video.

That is deliberate rather than incidental. A video that cannot be captioned reliably must not be the only route to information a person needs in order to choose someone to talk to.

Automatic captions are requested for every introduction video when it is approved. This is the best we can currently offer at our size, and we know it is not good enough for anyone who depends on captions being accurate.

Human-reviewed captions are not something we do today, and we are not going to describe them as though we did. What we can say is that the written profile beside every video carries the same information, and it is not an afterthought.

GraceBook is an ordinary website — no application to install, and nothing that requires a particular browser. It should work with screen readers, browser zoom, and operating-system text size and contrast settings.

Sessions need a browser that can use your camera and microphone. If that is a barrier, an audio-only session is always an option, and a text-based session is available too.

Write to contact@thegracebook.com. It helps if you can say what you were trying to do, what happened, and what you are using — but tell us in whatever way is easiest.

If something on this page is out of date, that is worth telling us about too.