Accessibility Statement

1. The short version

We build this website to WCAG 2.2 Level AA as our working standard. We have tested it ourselves, we have found problems and fixed them, and section 8 lists what is still open. We are not claiming that this site conforms to that standard, because we have not had it independently audited and we would rather tell you what we actually know.

If any part of this site does not work for you, tell us. Email info@velcrestwebdev.com or call (304) 602-3470, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM Eastern. A real person reads it, and you will generally hear back within one business day.

And if the site is in your way, you do not have to use it. Everything here — prices, what we do, answers to questions, starting a project — you can get by phone or by email instead. That is section 4.

2. The standard we build to

The benchmark is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2, Level AA. It includes everything in WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which is the version most often named in accessibility settlements and in the requirements businesses are asked to meet.

We build to it. We do not certify it. Conformance is an all-or-nothing claim about every page, every component and every state of a website at once. One missed alt attribute, one control that loses its focus outline, one contrast ratio that changes because a photograph sits behind it, and the claim is false — and a false accessibility claim is a worse problem than the barrier it was covering up.

So this page does something more useful instead: it says what we did, how we checked it, and what we know is outstanding. That is the same position our Terms of Service take. Section 5 of the Terms says we build to this standard but do not provide formal accessibility certification, and Section 24 says we do not give legal or regulatory advice. Nothing on this page changes either of those.

One thing worth knowing, because it is sold to small businesses constantly: there is no such thing as an ADA certification for a website. The Americans with Disabilities Act does not name a technical standard, and no government body issues a certificate against it. Anyone offering to make your website "ADA certified" is selling you a certificate, not accessibility.

3. If something here does not work for you

This is the part of the page that matters. If you hit a barrier on this site — you cannot reach something with a keyboard, a screen reader skips it, text is too faint, a form will not submit, something moves when you would rather it did not — we want to know, and we would rather hear about it than not.

Email: info@velcrestwebdev.com
Phone: (304) 602-3470, Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM Eastern
Fax: (304) 407-4850

What to tell us, if you can: the address of the page, what you were trying to do, and what happened instead. If you know the browser or the assistive technology you were using, that helps us reproduce it faster. If you do not, say what happened and we will work it out — you should not have to do our diagnostics for us.

What happens next. You get a reply from a real person, generally within one business day. We try to reproduce the problem, and we tell you plainly what we found: that we have fixed it, that we are fixing it, or that we cannot fix it and what the alternative is. We treat a barrier on this site as a fault in our work, not as a feature request.

What we will not do is promise you a repair deadline we cannot keep. How long a fix takes depends on what it is, and a published number that slips is just another false statement. What we do commit to: an answer generally within one business day, an honest account of what we found, work starting on the fixes that are ours to make rather than a position in a queue, and — while anything is outstanding — the phone and email routes in the next section standing in for whatever is broken, so you are never blocked from the actual service while we work.

We keep a record of what gets reported to us and what we did about it, so nothing quietly disappears and so we can tell you what changed.

4. Another way to get anything on this site

A website is a way of reaching a business. It is not the business. If this one is not working for you, for any reason at all, everything it offers is available another way:

• Prices, what is included, how the work runs — ask by phone or email and we will tell you, in whatever detail you want
• Starting a project — the contact form is only one route. A phone call or an email does exactly the same thing, and reaches the same person
• Anything written on this site — including the Terms of Service, the Privacy Policy and this page — can be sent to you as plain text, in larger print, or read to you over the phone. Ask and we will do it. There is no charge and you do not need to give a reason

Nothing on this site is a transaction you can only complete online. There is no checkout, no account to create and no booking system here, so there is nothing you can lose access to by not using the website.

5. What this site does

Specific things, so you can check them rather than take our word:

• It works with a keyboard. Every link, button and form field can be reached and operated without a mouse. A "Skip to content" link is the first thing in the tab order on every page. When the mobile menu is open, the rest of the page is taken out of the tab order and out of the accessibility tree rather than left behind the panel, and closing it puts focus back on the button that opened it.
• Focus is visible. Whatever you have tabbed to is outlined in a 2px white ring, set off from the element, on every link, button and field — including form fields, which commonly lose it.
• Contrast is measured, not estimated. Every piece of text on every page, apart from the three demonstration pages described in section 9, was measured against the actual pixels behind it, including text over photographs and over the home-page film, at desktop and phone sizes. All of it meets the 4.5:1 the standard asks for, or 3:1 for large text, measured against the lightest point behind it rather than an average. Where a photograph or the film was too light behind text, we darkened that part of the picture rather than accept a lower number. Button borders and form-field underlines sit above 4:1, where the standard asks 3:1 for controls. (One slash-shaped divider on the About page is below the ratio. It is marked as decoration, it is not read out, and nothing depends on seeing it.)
• The structure is real. One first-level heading per page, no skipped heading levels anywhere, proper landmarks, and every navigation region labelled — so moving through a page by headings or by landmarks gets you somewhere sensible.
• Every image has an alt attribute. Images that carry meaning are described; images that are decoration are marked as decoration so a screen reader passes over them instead of reading a filename.
• Forms are labelled. Every field has a visible label tied to it, and the form says on screen that every field is required unless it is marked optional. Error messages say what is wrong and what to do about it, rather than turning a box red.
• A message is not thrown away because a hidden field was filled in. The contact form's spam check includes a field that people never see. Some browser extensions fill in every field on a page, including that one. When it happens, the message is still delivered to us, marked for a second look, rather than discarded.
• The contact form asks you a question, not an image puzzle. The spam check is a plain arithmetic question in text, generated and verified on our own server, and it is announced together with the box you type it into. We deliberately did not use an image-based CAPTCHA, which would have been a wall for anyone using a screen reader, and we deliberately did not use a third-party one, which would have sent your details to another company to be scored.
• The home-page film can be stopped, and nothing is only spoken. The short film at the top of the home page plays once, silently unless you turn the sound on (turn the sound on partway through and it starts over one time, so you hear every line), and a "Skip intro" button ends it at any time. Scrolling down past it ends it too, and the page scrolls normally while it plays. Every line the narrator speaks is also on screen as text. It plays when you open the home page directly, never when you arrive from another page of the site.
• It respects reduced motion. If your device is set to reduce motion, the home-page film never plays (you see the finished page instead), sections do not fade or move as you scroll, and the moving parts hold still. Without that setting, the small moving details, such as the dot on the open/closed badge and the "Scroll" cue on the home page, stop by themselves within five seconds, as does the slow drift of the photograph behind the page-not-found message. The sound icon's bars flash twice near the start of the film to show where the sound button is, then move only while sound you turned on is playing. Nothing is hidden behind an animation you have turned off.
• It is built to work in Windows High Contrast mode. We checked every page, apart from the three demonstration pages, in a simulation of that mode, with both a dark and a light theme, at desktop and phone sizes. Nothing disappears, and logos whose lettering would vanish against the theme's colours keep their own dark tile.
• It reflows. The site reads in a window 320 pixels wide, or at 400% zoom, without scrolling sideways to find the rest of a sentence, and it survives having its text spacing, line height and letter spacing overridden.
• It works without JavaScript. If scripts are blocked or fail, nothing is left invisible or empty, and the contact form is replaced by our email address and phone number rather than by an error.
• Nothing loads from anyone else. The fonts are on our own server. There are no third-party scripts, no trackers, no embeds, no cookie banner to trap you before you reach the page. Everything on this site is ours, which means every accessibility problem on it is ours to fix — there is no vendor to wait for.
• The legal pages print. The Terms and the Privacy Policy print as black text on white paper, with link destinations written out, if you would rather read them that way.

6. Why there is no accessibility button on this site

You may have seen a floating icon on other websites that opens a panel of accessibility options — an overlay, or accessibility widget. We do not use one, and we will not install one on a site we build.

Those tools sit on top of a website and try to patch it from the outside. They do not repair the underlying markup, they frequently interfere with the screen reader, magnifier or keyboard setup a person has already configured to work the way they need, and the organisations that actually represent disabled users have been consistent and public in asking businesses not to use them. Installing one would also mean loading a third party's script onto every page of this site, which would break the privacy position the rest of this website rests on.

We fix the site instead. It is slower and it is the only thing that actually works.

7. How we have checked it

This is a self-assessment. The site has not been audited or certified by an independent organisation, and no disability organisation has reviewed it. It was reviewed in-house.

It was reviewed twice on 15 September 2026, against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, on the built site rather than on the source. What that involved:

• Every page walked for heading order, landmarks, image alt attributes, link names, page titles and language
• Contrast computed for each piece of text against the real stack of colours behind it, including the photographic backgrounds, rather than read off a design file
• Real Tab key presses recorded through every page, including with the mobile menu open, to see where focus actually goes and whether it can be seen when it gets there
• Every page rendered again with scripting disabled, to check that nothing stays hidden and that the contact route survives
• Layout measured at a 320-pixel window width, and with the text-spacing overrides applied

The findings were written up, and the problems that were found were fixed and re-checked rather than noted and left.

It was reviewed again on 29 September 2026, this time including the home-page film, the scroll-through view of the four phases on the process page, and the sitemap page, which had been added since. That review measured the contrast of every piece of text on every page other than the demonstration pages against the pixels actually behind it, at desktop and phone sizes, including over the film while it plays and over its last frame at ten window sizes; walked the keyboard through the film and the process page; and checked the same pages in a simulation of Windows High Contrast mode with a dark and a light theme. Everything it found was fixed and measured again before this date was put at the top of the page.

Browser engines: every page is also tested in the Chromium and WebKit browser engines. Chromium is the engine behind Chrome, Edge and Brave, and WebKit the engine behind Safari. Each page is loaded at a desktop size and at a phone size and checked for errors, broken images and anything that scrolls sideways. That test was last run on 29 September 2026, and passed.

What was not tested: a real screen reader — NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver have not been run against this site, and our findings about them come from reading the code and the accessibility tree; Windows High Contrast mode on Windows itself, as opposed to the simulation described above; the Firefox browser; real phones, since phone sizes were tested in a desktop browser; and the three demonstration pages described in section 9, which were checked for structure but not re-measured for contrast.

8. What is still open

• No screen reader has been run against this site. We have checked what the code exposes and what the accessibility tree says, which catches most problems but not the ones you only hear. A screen-reader pass is the next thing we intend to do. Until it has happened, if a screen reader gives you trouble anywhere on this site, section 4 is a way around it and section 3 is how to tell us.

If you find something that is not on this list, section 3 is how to tell us, and it is genuinely welcome. We would rather fix it than leave it working badly.

9. Pages on this site that are demonstrations

The Work page links to three complete landing pages for businesses that do not exist. They are there to show what we build. Each one is labelled as fictitious, uses a 555 phone number, and is kept out of search results.

They are built on their own visual systems rather than on this site's, and they have not been measured to the same level as the pages you are reading now — we checked their structure, their skip links and their labelling, but we did not re-measure their colour contrast. Treat them as samples, not as accessibility examples. The links to them open in a new tab, and each link says so to screen readers before you follow it.

The Groundwork page links to nine example pages for three more fictitious businesses. They have their own designs and no skip link, and their colour contrast has been checked by calculation but not re-measured in the way the pages you are reading were. The Groundwork page itself was added on October 6, 2026 and has not yet had the review described in section 7.

This statement covers velcrestwebdev.com. Our client portal runs as a separate application on its own address and is not described here.

10. A website we built for someone else

We design and build websites for other businesses, and those sites belong to those businesses. This statement covers this website only.

What we do for a client's site is build it to the same standard described in section 2 — that is our construction standard, and it is in the project agreement. What we do not do, unless it is separately agreed, is audit or certify a client's website, produce a VPAT or a conformance report, or review a client's own business and content for legal compliance. That is Section 5 and Section 24 of our Terms of Service, and it is a real limit, not a formality: a site can leave us in good shape and then take on a scanned PDF, a video with no captions or an image with no description, and we have no way to know.

If you have hit a barrier on a site we built for someone else, tell us anyway — info@velcrestwebdev.com or (304) 602-3470 — and include the web address. We will pass it to the site's owner, because it is their website and their decision. Where the problem is in code we wrote and the owner asks us to fix it, we will. What we cannot do is change a site we no longer maintain without being asked to. If you would rather go to the owner directly, their contact details will be on the site itself, and we will help you find them if they are not.

11. What this page is not

It is not a certificate, and it is not a conformance claim. It is not a warranty or a contract, and it does not change the Terms of Service. It is not legal advice, to you or to anyone — we do not give it, and this page is not us giving it.

What it is: an honest description of how this website is built, how it was tested, what we know is wrong with it, and how to reach a person who will do something about it.

Who it is from: Kinetic Margin Holdings, LLC, a West Virginia limited liability company doing business as Velcrest Web Development, which operates this website. "We," "us" and "our" on this page mean that company.

12. Keeping this page true

The date at the top is the date this page was last reviewed against the actual site, not the date it was last edited.

We review it at least once a year, whenever the site changes in a way that could affect any of this, and whenever somebody reports a barrier — because a report usually means something on this page needs to change too. When we fix something in section 8, it comes off the list; when we find something new, it goes on.

If this page has gone stale, that is worth telling us about as well.