Accessibility

A reading has three states, and each one carries a tone, a hatch pattern, a glyph and a word. Remove the colour entirely and the reading still says the same thing.

The “maybe” state is deliberately never rendered as a failure or a warning. It means the clearance is small enough that a measurement cannot settle it, which is a different thing from “no”.

Two of the eight brand colours fall short of 4.5:1 against the page ground, so they are not used for text at all. The grey is restricted to large text and to lines; the amber appears only as a filled field with dark text on it, or as a fill carrying a dark outline. The ratios are also recorded in a comment at the top of the stylesheet, next to the values themselves.

The animation on the home page — the shape that is stopped at the turn, waits, rotates and goes through — is the quickest way to say what this tool is. If your system asks for reduced motion, it is not played at all. In its place you get the two orientations set side by side, which says the same thing without anything moving.

Nothing on this site auto-plays sound, flashes, or moves without being asked.

• Everything interactive can be reached and operated from the keyboard, in a sensible order.
• Focus is always visible, as a thick outline in the turn colour with a clear offset.
• A skip link is the first thing in the tab order on every page.
• Headings are properly nested; landmarks are used for the header, the main region and the footer.
• Every illustration has alt text, or is explicitly hidden from assistive technology where it is purely atmospheric. No information is carried by a picture alone.
• The route profile — the drawing of every narrow point — always has a plain-text equivalent immediately below it, listing each point in order with its clearance range and the orientation that gets through.

The measuring guide is built for one hand, because the other one is holding a tape measure. One measurement per screen, large targets, no pinching, and no scrolling back and forth between the instruction and the box you type into.

Numbers can be typed in whichever unit you are working in — millimetres, centimetres, metres, inches or feet and inches — and are read back in the same unit. You are never asked to convert anything.

There is a print stylesheet. A reading prints as a clean sheet with the route profile, the clearance at each point, the packaging note and the measuring card, without navigation or decoration, so it can go in a pocket and be used against the actual wall.

The route profile is a wide drawing. On a narrow screen it scrolls sideways within its own frame rather than shrinking to the point of being unreadable; the text equivalent below it carries the same information in a single column.

If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, write to support@sparklingen.shop or ring +44 7597298116. Describe what you were trying to do and what happened; you do not need to know why it went wrong.

We reply within one working day and we will tell you honestly whether we can fix it and when. If you need a reading and cannot get one from the site, we will work it out and send it to you.