Accessibility

Readability isn’t a feature of this site — it is the reason the site exists. So this page is a list of specifics rather than a statement of intent: what we have actually built, where we know we still fall short, and how to tell us when something is wrong. The two settings it describes are on the page itself, just below, so you can change them before you read a word of it.

The standard we work to

We build to WCAG 2.2 Level AA and treat it as a floor rather than a target. Where the guidelines and the comfort of an eighty-year-old reader disagree, we follow the reader. Body text starts at 20 pixels instead of the usual 16, a line of it holds about sixty-five characters rather than running the full width of the window, and every text and background pair on the site is checked for contrast.

Reading

• Atkinson Hyperlegible throughout. Designed by the Braille Institute to keep easily confused characters — capital I, lowercase l, the numeral 1, and the pairs O/0 and c/e — clearly distinct. In a grid of unrelated letters that matters more than usual. The font files are served from this site rather than from a font service, so the page does not have to fetch anything from anyone else before it can be read.
• Three sizes for the puzzle letters. The A / A+ / A++ buttons enlarge the grid and the word list together — A++ is about a third larger than A — and your choice is remembered on your device for the next puzzle. They set the size of the letters you play with; ordinary page text follows your browser and system settings instead, which is the next point.
• A high-contrast mode. One button switches the site to black on white, with stronger borders in place of the soft shading and warm tints. It applies to every page, not just the puzzle: turn it on here and the header, the footer, the puzzle grid and every other page are already black on white when you get there, this visit and the next one.
• Your own text size is respected. The layout is built in relative units, so raising the default text size in your browser or operating system enlarges the whole site rather than breaking the columns. We check these pages at twice the default text size, on a phone and on a desktop, and nothing there needs scrolling sideways to read.
• Colour is never the only signal. A found word is struck through in the word list as well as tinted in the grid, and the empty ring beside it fills with a tick, so the information survives colour blindness and a black-and-white printout alike.

Playing without a mouse

The whole game works from the keyboard. The grid is a single tab stop, so you never have to press Tab a hundred and forty-four times to get past it, and the grid carries a spoken description of how to select a word, so a screen reader explains it the moment you arrive rather than leaving you to guess.

Arrow keys

Move from letter to letter.

Home and End

Jump to the start or the end of the current row.

Enter or Space

Start a selection at the current letter, then press again to confirm it once you have extended it across the word.

Escape

Cancel a selection you have started.

Tab

Move between the grid and the surrounding controls — letter size, contrast, timer, hint, restart, and printing.

Focus is always visible: a thick blue outline, deliberately chosen in a colour that has nothing to do with the amber used for highlights, so you can never mistake one for the other.

Screen readers

• Each letter is labelled with its position and value — “Row 4, column 7, letter S” — so the grid can be explored methodically.
• Finding a word is announced politely, along with how many of the twelve you have found. Finishing announces the completion and your time.
• Pages use real headings, landmarks, and labelled navigation, and every page starts with a skip link to the main content.
• Buttons that toggle a setting report their state twice over, so contrast and letter size are never left to guesswork: announced as pressed or not, and shown on screen too — the chosen letter size fills in solid, and high contrast fills its mark with a tick. A control that only tells a screen reader what it is doing is half a control, and the people who need these two most are the ones who can see, but not well.

Touch, motor, and pace

• Two ways to take a word, and neither needs a steady hand. Drag across it from first letter to last, or tap the first letter and then the last with no dragging at all — choosing the first letter again cancels it. The two-tap way is the one to use with a tremor or limited dexterity, and on a phone it is also the only way to take an up-and-down word, because swiping straight down scrolls the page. Both are written on the puzzle page itself, not just spoken to a screen reader.
• Targets are sized to be tapped rather than aimed at. Every button and every navigation link is at least 44 pixels tall — the size the strictest level of WCAG asks for — and almost all of them are 48 or more: the buttons on a puzzle, the links in the header and footer, and the contents list on this page. Two stop at 44 rather than 48, the logo link in the header and the “All word search puzzles” link above a puzzle, and both of those are over 230 pixels wide. The letter squares inside a puzzle grid are the one real exception, and they are in the list of shortfalls below.
• There is no time limit anywhere on the site. The timer is optional and can be switched off; nothing expires, and no puzzle is ever lost because you took a week over it.
• Progress is saved on your own device as you go, so you can close the tab mid-puzzle and pick it up later.
• Hints cost nothing and nothing is scored or ranked, so there is no penalty for playing slowly or for changing your mind. If you finish puzzles on consecutive days the page says so — that is the extent of the record-keeping, and it is kept on your device.
• No CAPTCHAs, no pop-ups, no autoplaying sound or video, and nothing that flickers or strobes.

Motion

Animation is limited to short transitions on buttons and cards, a found word settling letter by letter from amber into green, and the panel that appears when you finish. If your device is set to reduce motion, every one of those stops: the transitions become instant, the letters change colour without moving, and the hint highlight does not pulse. We honour the setting rather than substituting a gentler animation of our own.

On paper

Printing is a first-class part of the site, not an afterthought. Every puzzle is a 12 by 12 grid and prints on one sheet: grid letters at 21.1 point bold in squares 1.35 cm across — a little over half an inch — and the word list at 17 point bold with a tick box beside each word. The rules are solid black rather than grey, because grey is the first thing a photocopier loses. Those three numbers are measured off the printed sheet, not estimated. There is more about printing on the large print page.

Where we know we fall short

Every accessibility page should have this section, and most don’t. Ours:

• On a small phone the letters stay large but the squares themselves get tight for a fingertip: on a 390 pixel wide phone a grid square measures about 31 pixels across, well under the 44 we hold every other target to. On a desktop window the same square is about 55. A tablet, a computer, or a printout is more comfortable today.
• There is no dark mode. The site has two appearances — warm paper, and the black-on-white high-contrast setting above — and neither is light text on a dark background. If you find a bright page uncomfortable, or you read at night, we have nothing better to offer you than your browser or operating system’s own reading mode at the moment.
• The letter-size buttons enlarge the puzzle, not the site’s ordinary text. For that you still need your browser’s own zoom or text-size setting, which works properly here but is one more thing to know.
• We have not commissioned an independent audit. Everything on this page is what we have built and tested ourselves, which is not the same thing as being verified by someone else.

Tell us when it’s wrong

If anything here is hard to read, hard to reach, or hard to understand, that is a defect and we want to hear about it. Email hello@bigprintgames.com or use the contact page. Accessibility reports go to the front of the queue, ahead of new puzzles and new features.

It helps if you can say what device and browser you were using and what you were trying to do — but a message that just says “the buttons on this page are too small for me” is genuinely useful too. Send that.

Back to the top of this page