Shared Record accessibility
What the Shared Record commits to for readers who use a keyboard, a screen reader, or reduced motion: the target, the rules each control is held to, and how a change is reviewed.
A Shared Record is opened by people under time pressure who did not choose the tool: an outside evaluator, an auditor, an oversight office's analyst, a customer's engineer. The page has to work for every one of them, so accessibility is part of what the page promises.
Target
The Shared Record, the code screen, and the printed statement target WCAG 2.1 AA for text contrast, keyboard navigation, screen reader labels, focus management, and reduced-motion preferences.
Rules
These are the rules every Shared Record surface is held to before it ships.
- Every control on the page must be reachable and usable with the keyboard alone: the code field, Find it on the ledger, Change one character, Check again, Restore, pasting a seal, the drop targets for an entry's copy and for a file, Record that you checked this, Keep a copy, Print a statement, Download history, and Show details. On the share card, so must the choice for each entry and each field.
- The code screen's field must have a visible label, and its errors must be announced with
aria-live="polite": the wrong-length sentence, the wrong-code sentence, and the too-many-tries sentence. - The first sentence, the check's result, must be announced when it changes, so a screen reader hears "Checking this record in your browser." and then the count.
- A state must never be color alone. Every square carries its word: Committed, Recording, Not applied, Matches, Does not match.
- The calendar's days and the bars must be reachable by keyboard, and the readout for a day is text and is announced.
- A disclosure must say whether it is open, and the entry detail's Open and Close are buttons with those words.
- "Keep a copy" and "Download history" must say what they save and its format.
Motion
The mark moves while the check runs and settles when it finishes. With prefers-reduced-motion: reduce set, the mark does not move and the sentence alone carries the state.
Contrast
The record surface is a dark reading environment. Body text meets 4.5:1 and large text 3:1 against it. A state's color is always paired with its word.
Review before a change ships
- Automated accessibility checks on the code screen, the passed and the failed first sentence, a link that shows seals only, a link with revealed fields, a link made before 1 October 2026, the share card's chooser, and the statement.
- Keyboard-only walk through every control above.
- Screen reader read of the first sentence in each of its states, and of the code screen's three error sentences.
- Reduced-motion behavior of the mark.