Accessibility

Our aim

Mach 9 is built for students, which means it has to work for students using assistive technology too. We build against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a working standard, not a checkbox, we do not claim formal WCAG or ADA conformance, because that requires a level of audit and testing we have not yet completed, but accessibility is treated as a real requirement during development, not an afterthought.

What that looks like on this site today

• A visible focus ring on every interactive element for keyboard users, distinct from how it looks to a mouse.
• A “skip to content” link at the top of every page for keyboard and screen-reader users.
• Real form labels, required-field marking, and error messages announced to screen readers.
• Icon-only buttons (search, cart, close, gallery arrows, and similar) carry a text label for screen readers even where there is no visible text.
• Motion respects your operating system’s “reduce motion” setting, background animation, 3D scenes and page transitions scale back or stop rather than overriding that preference.
• Alt text on informational photos and illustrations; purely decorative images are hidden from screen readers instead of read aloud as noise.

Where we know we still fall short

Some of this site is genuinely complex to make fully accessible, in particular the interactive 3D models in the Academy and the homepage’s photo reel. We keep improving these rather than pretending they are finished; if one of them doesn’t work for you, the fastest fix is telling us specifically what happened, since we may not have hit that case ourselves.

Reporting a problem

If you hit a barrier anywhere on this site, a control you can’t reach with a keyboard, text a screen reader skips or misreads, contrast that’s hard to read, or anything else, email mach9.co@gmail.com with the page and what happened. We read every message and treat this as an ongoing job, not a one-time pass.