Built to be read by everyone.

This site aims to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That is a target held deliberately rather than a certificate held already: accessibility is treated as part of the design work, revisited whenever a page changes.

Pages are built from semantic HTML — real headings in order, real lists, real landmarks — so assistive technology can move through them structurally rather than guessing.

Everything interactive is reachable and operable by keyboard alone, in a sensible order, with a visible focus ring. A skip link at the top of every page jumps straight past the header to the main content.

Motion honours the operating system's reduce-motion setting. Where the home page types its opening line out, the full sentence is present for assistive technology from the first frame and never animates for a reader who has asked for stillness.

Colour is never the only carrier of meaning, and text is set against its background at contrast ratios that clear the AA threshold. Type is fluid, the layout is authored for small screens first and verified at 360 pixels wide, and no page scrolls sideways.

Historical imagery is editorial rather than informational. It is marked decorative so screen readers pass over it instead of announcing filenames, and it is hidden entirely on small screens where it would only crowd the text.

No icon fonts and no icon library are used anywhere on the site, which removes a common source of unlabelled, unreadable controls. Where a control needs to show state, it does so with a typographic character.

The historical plates carry no descriptive alternative text. This is a considered choice — they illustrate mood rather than argument, and nothing in them is needed to follow a page — but it does mean their content is unavailable to a reader who cannot see them.

Written pieces are long, and long-form reading is demanding by nature. Work continues on in-page navigation for the longer essays.

The site has been tested by hand with a keyboard and with screen readers, but it has not been through a formal third-party audit.

If any part of this site is difficult or impossible to use, please say so — write to info@theqalaminstitute.org and describe what happened, which page, and what you were using. Reports of this kind are taken seriously and acted on rather than filed.

If something you need is inaccessible, ask for it in another form and it will be sent to you directly.