Accessibility at Donna

We want Donna usable by everyone, including people who rely on assistive technology. We target WCAG 2.1 Level AA and treat accessibility as part of the product, not a box to tick. This page says what we design and test for, how we check it, and what we know is still short.

Status: partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA — most of the standard is met, and the exceptions we know about are listed below rather than left for you to find. Last reviewed 31 July 2026.

What we design and test for

The U.S. Department of Justice names six common barriers to an accessible website. Here is where each stands.

• Color contrast

  We pick text and interface colors to clear WCAG AA contrast against the background they actually land on, and we compute the ratios rather than judge them by eye. One deliberate exception is named under Known gaps.

• Information not conveyed by color alone

  We design so anything signalled with color — a status, a required field, a failed submission — also carries a word, so nothing depends on color vision.

• Image alt text

  We write descriptive alternative text for images that carry meaning, and hide decorative ones from screen readers so they don't add noise. The product previews on the home page are each exposed as one described image rather than walking you through inert screenshot furniture.

• Accessible forms

  We build fields with a real associated label, tie their instructions and errors to the field programmatically, and announce a failure rather than only coloring the border.

• Keyboard navigation

  We design and test for full keyboard operability: controls reachable and operable with the keyboard alone, a visible focus outline on each, and a skip-to-content link. Anything that only looks like a control is built so it cannot take focus, so the keyboard never lands on something that does nothing.

• Video captions

  Not applicable — this site has no video content.

Beyond those six

Three more places this site had to make a call.

• Motion you can stop

  The one thing that moves on its own — the scrolling band under the headline — carries a Pause control, and it starts parked if your system asks for reduced motion. We treat the operating-system preference as a starting state, not as the control itself, because it does nothing for a visitor who never set it.

• Zoom and reflow

  We check the page down to a 320-pixel-wide viewport — the width WCAG uses to stand in for 400% zoom — so content reflows into one column instead of forcing you to scroll sideways to read a line.

• Text spacing

  We check the page with line height, letter spacing and word spacing pushed to the WCAG test values, so text set larger for readability doesn't get clipped by a fixed-height box.

How we check

On every page of this site — the home page, this one, Terms and Privacy — we run an automated audit against the WCAG A and AA rule sets, walk the whole page with the keyboard alone, and compute the contrast of every visible piece of text against the background it is really composited over, rather than sampling colors by eye.

Automated tools catch a minority of real accessibility problems, and our own keyboard pass is not the same as watching someone use the site with the tools they depend on. That is why the wording above is what we design and test for, and why the gaps below are published instead of quietly held back.

Known gaps

What we would tell you if you asked us directly.

• No screen-reader audit by someone who uses one daily

  We test the markup a screen reader reads — roles, names, states, heading order, focus order — and we read it back out of the browser's accessibility tree. That is not the same as watching a daily VoiceOver, NVDA or JAWS user try to get through the page, and we haven't done that yet. It is the single biggest gap on this list.

• No independent third-party audit

  Everything here is our own testing. Nobody outside Donna has certified this site, which is why we say partially conformant rather than conformant.

• The oversized wordmark behind the footer

  It sits at roughly 1.3:1 against the page, under what WCAG asks even of large text. It is a watermark: hidden from screen readers, not selectable, bleeding off the bottom edge, and the only word it repeats — Donna — is already in the navigation, the footer text and the page title, so nothing is only there. We've kept it as a deliberate exception rather than change the mark.

• Resting borders on the sign-up field

  The outline of the email field is fainter than the 3:1 WCAG asks of a control's boundary. The field is still identifiable from the placeholder inside it, and it takes a high-contrast outline the moment it's focused, but the resting border is thinner than the standard wants.

Using a screen reader

Donna is built to work with your device’s own screen reader. It can’t turn one on for you — no website can — but yours is already on your device:

• VoiceOver (Mac and iPhone): press ⌘ F5, or ask Siri to turn on VoiceOver.
• NVDA (Windows): a free screen reader from nvaccess.org.
• It also works with Narrator on Windows and TalkBack on Android.

Report an issue

If any part of Donna is hard to use with assistive technology, tell us and we’ll fix it — including anything on this page we’ve called a gap. Email hello@thanksdonna.com and describe what you were trying to do.