Project Honeycomb · Accessibility
Using the archive without a mouse, or without sight of it
The archive is a visual thing — a comb of faces, lit from behind. It is meant to work for people who cannot see it, cannot use a pointer, or cannot tolerate motion, and this page says how far that is true today. The aim is WCAG 2.1 level AA.
01
What works now
- Keyboard. Every cell in the comb is reachable with Tab and opens with Enter or Space. The story panel, the recorder and the gate are ordinary forms and buttons.
- Screen readers. Each cell is announced by the contributor’s chosen name; decorative imagery is hidden from assistive technology. Every story with a recording also carries its written transcript, shown beside the player.
- Reduced motion. If your system asks for reduced motion, the parallax, the reveal animation and the glow transitions are turned off.
- Phones. On a narrow screen the comb becomes a single column that scrolls like a page, with nothing off the edge.
- Text. The site is readable at 200% zoom. Self-hosted fonts; no text is drawn as an image.
02
What does not work yet
- Captions. Recordings have a transcript beside them but no synchronized captions on the video itself. The machine transcript already carries word timings, so timed captions are the next step; until then the transcript is the text alternative.
- Contrast. Some gold-on-dark elements in the comb have not yet been measured against the AA ratio; the story text and the forms have.
- Audio description. Recordings are not audio-described. Most are a person speaking to camera, which the transcript covers; where a recording shows something else, the written account is the alternative.
03
Tell us
If something here does not work for you, email contact@projecthoneycomb.site with the subject Accessibility and say what you were trying to do and what happened. A person reads it, and what you tell us goes on the list above.