The standard we hold ourselves to

Accessibility at Outpost

An education platform that cannot be used by somebody with a screen reader has not published the material to them. It has published it near them. The whole argument of this organization is that a citizen cannot hold a government to account without being able to read what it did — applying that to ourselves means the material has to be reachable, not merely present.

The standard

WCAG 2.2 Level AA, as the target for every public surface. We state a target rather than a claim of conformance, because a conformance claim is a promise about every page on every day and we cannot verify that today. What we can do is say where we are, and this page does.

The floor every piece of learning material must clear

From the standard the build itself checks — a unit that does not clear this does not ship:

The full content exists as text, in reading order, with real headings
Nothing essential is carried by color alone, by sound alone, or by position alone
Every image that carries meaning has alt text saying what it is for, and decorative images are marked decorative
Anything with sound has captions; anything with meaningful visuals has a description in words
Everything is operable by keyboard, in a visible order, with a visible focus indicator
Text reflows at 200% zoom with no loss of content and no horizontal scrolling
Motion is decorative only, and is suppressed under prefers-reduced-motion

What that floor is not: Sufficient. A page can clear every item above and still be hard to learn from. The floor prevents exclusion; it does not produce good teaching, and the pedagogy standard is the other half.

Our standard names hearing and vision as access routes. That is a gap and it is listed below, not smoothed over.

What we have deliberately built

Most of Outpost needs no server. The Academy works offline, the Arcade runs in the browser, the Library is static text. A person on a slow, metered, or intermittent connection is not a person who gets less of it.
No content is behind a price. Nothing about ability, income, or equipment changes what a person can read here.
prefers-reduced-motion is respected. Motion is decoration and decoration is optional.
A children’s surface built separately, so an adult context can never be reached from inside it — which also means its reading level, pacing and controls are its own.
No engagement mechanics. No infinite scroll, no autoplay, no interruption. These are accessibility features as much as ethical ones: they are what makes a page finishable.

Where we currently fall short

This section is the reason the statement is worth publishing, and it is the section most organizations leave out.

We have not completed an independent audit. No third party has tested these surfaces. Everything above is our own assessment of our own work, which is the weakest kind of evidence and is labelled as such.
We have not tested with assistive technology users. Automated checks and a developer with a keyboard are not the same as somebody who uses a screen reader every day, and we will not describe our surfaces as verified until that has happened.
Our own standard covers hearing and vision, and stops there. accessibility_standard.json is organised around those two routes. Motor access is covered only through the keyboard requirement above, and executive-function access is handled by a separate module that is not part of the standard at all. Found 2026-09-02 while checking this page against the file it cites — it had not been noticed in the fortnight the draft sat in a folder. What would close it: extending the standard to carry motor and cognitive access as named routes with their own approaches, evidence tiers and sources, the way hearing and vision already are.
Coverage is uneven. The gate covers learning units. It does not yet cover every page of the wider platform.
Some things are not built. There is no published keyboard-shortcut reference. There is no plain-language alternative for the denser civic pages. Captioning of any future video is a commitment, not an achievement.
We do not yet know what we do not know. The list above is what we have found, not what exists.

How to tell us we have failed you

Report a barrier the same way you would report a wrong fact — through Report an error. Tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and what happened. If you use assistive technology, telling us which helps and is never required.

We will acknowledge within five business days.
We will tell you what we found and what we are going to do, including when the answer is that we cannot fix it soon — which is more useful to you than silence that looks like progress.
A barrier report is treated as a correction, not a feature request. Our corrections ledger is public, and accessibility fixes belong in it.
We will not ask you to prove you need it.

What this statement does not do

It does not certify conformance. It does not create a legal right you do not already have. It does not substitute for the obligations any law places on us. It is a statement of the standard we hold ourselves to, the gaps we know about, and the route by which you can tell us about the ones we do not.