We point the scanner at ourselves, and publish what it says

One element that had never been looked at

The optional “How did you hear about us?” field on the main page sits inside a collapsed block. Our own scanner did not open collapsed blocks, so for as long as that field has existed it was invisible to the check, and every “zero violations” line we published was measured without it. We changed the scanner on 22 August 2026 to open them first. Nothing was failing behind that block — but we did not know that, and we had been publishing a number that did not cover it.

For part of that day the field came back as needs review rather than a pass. The checker could not read its background colour: the colour was painted as a gradient with both ends set to the same colour as the page — an old defensive trick to stop other browsers drawing their own background over it. We left it alone at first, on the grounds that we could not test those other browsers.

Then we tested them. We installed Firefox and WebKit locally and photographed the field in all three engines with the gradient on, then off, then on again. Two engines were identical to the pixel; the third differed by seven pixels of corner smoothing out of seventy-one thousand. The gradient was doing nothing, so it is gone. The field is now read like every other element in that form, and it comes back as a pass. At the time that took the count above from fourteen down to twelve — the number went down because the thing the checker could not read was removed, not because we stopped looking at it. The remaining twelve are dealt with further down this page.

Later the same day we stopped guessing about Safari too. Nobody here owns an Apple device, so we rented one for three minutes: a hosted Mac runs Safari, opens this site, reads the field back and photographs it. Safari 26.5.2 draws it the same as every other browser we tested. That check is a file in our repository now, so it can be repeated rather than remembered. Two things are still untested: Safari on a phone or tablet, and Safari versions older than 15.4, which ignore the modern way of turning off a browser's own form styling — we added the older instruction for those the same day, but we have not watched it work.

The twelve we could not decide, where they went, and the two that came back

Until 26 August 2026 this row said twelve elements, on one page. On the research page, at 380 px, twelve table cells came back as needs review rather than pass or fail: the checker could not determine the background colour, because the cell was partly covered by the edge of the container the table scrolls inside.

On 26 August the site was redesigned and those tables moved into cards: a solid background of their own, and padding between the cell and the edge of the container. That was a visual change — nobody was thinking about the twelve — but it gave the checker the background colour it had been unable to work out, and it reads the result as a pass. We took the two halves apart to be sure which did the work: the card background accounts for eleven of the twelve, the padding for the last one. From then until 21 September 2026 the row was a zero.

On 21 September it went back to two, and the two are one video. We put a thirty-eight second demo on the front page, and the checker cannot decide whether a video needs captions, because it has no way to hear whether there is anything to caption. There is not: the file has no audio track at all. What it has instead is the full text of it printed on the page underneath, which is the part that actually matters — a silent video puts every word inside a picture, and a picture is no use to someone who cannot see it. The count is two rather than one because we scan every page at both widths, and it is the same video each time.

On 3 October 2026 it went back to zero, and not because we stopped looking. The front page was redesigned and the thirty-eight second demo was taken off it. In its place is a short silent loop that only illustrates the sentence next to it, so it is hidden from screen readers and a checker has nothing to ask about it. It plays on its own, so it has a pause button, and if your device asks for reduced motion it does not play at all. The first version of the redesign briefly added one result of its own: the checker could not work out the background behind the caption under that loop, because of a decorative glow. We moved the glow and the result went away.

None of this means the site is accessible. It means the checks a machine can run came back with nothing to flag — and a machine still catches roughly a third of what a person would. We are leaving the story on the page rather than deleting the paragraph, because a number that quietly loses its history is a more comfortable number, and a less true one.