How we build for accessibility, and the gaps
Silverbeck builds toward WCAG 2.2 Level AA. That is the working standard for this site, and it is a direction rather than a finish line. No outside firm has audited these pages, no conformance has been certified, and nothing here carries a badge claiming otherwise.
The standard, and what the standard is not
Level AA covers the things that decide whether a page is usable rather than merely present: contrast that survives a bright screen, structure a screen reader can navigate, controls reachable from a keyboard, motion that can be switched off. New pages are checked against those criteria as they are written, and older pages are rechecked whenever they get touched.
What you will not get from us is a claim that the site passes. Automated checkers catch a fraction of real problems, and the rest surface only when a person uses assistive technology on a live page. Where testing has happened, it is described below. Where it has not, that is said too.
Written for a phone held in a wet kitchen
Most people reading this site are not sitting at a desk. They are on the line during a rush, standing over an open trap with a flashlight, or in a back hallway with the dish machine running six feet away.
That context shaped the design more than any checklist did. Type is large. Contrast is high rather than fashionable. Pages are light enough to load on a weak signal at the back of a building, which also means they finish loading before anyone's patience runs out.
What is built into every page
Headings run in semantic order, level one then two then three, with nothing skipped to make text a certain size. Somebody navigating by heading can jump the outline of a page and land where they meant to land.
Focus is visible. Tab through a page and the ring follows you across every link and every button. The outline has not been removed anywhere, and it has not been swapped for a color shift so faint it vanishes on a phone in daylight.
Tap targets are at least 48 pixels tall, including phone links and navigation items. Buttons that sit next to each other keep space between them, so a thumb in a wet glove does not hit the wrong one.
Text contrast is measured against the AA ratio, 4.5 to 1 for body copy and 3 to 1 for large type, before a color goes into the stylesheet. Gray on gray does not survive that check, so you will not find it here.
Motion, scripts and the ways pages break
The live status indicator animates gently. If your system asks for reduced motion, the animation stops and a static state shows instead, because prefers-reduced-motion is honored in the stylesheet rather than ignored.
There is almost no JavaScript on this site. Switch it off and the pages still work: text reads, links follow, the phone number dials. Nothing that matters waits on a script to arrive.
Wide tables scroll inside their own container. On a narrow screen, a sizing chart or a fee schedule slides sideways within its box instead of stretching the page and shoving body text past the edge.
Every image carries alt text describing what the picture shows and why it sits where it does. Illustrations on this site are AI-generated, and the alt text does not pretend they are photographs of real jobs.
The phone number is a real link with real digits in the markup. It is not an image, not a string assembled by a script, and not hidden behind a click. A screen reader reads it aloud and a browser dials it.
Where this site is still hard work
Two kinds of pages stay demanding no matter how carefully they are marked up.
The first is dense specification and code tables. Capacity charts, flow rate figures and jurisdictional requirements pack many numbers into each row, and a screen reader has to walk them cell by cell. Header cells are marked as headers and scope is set, so the reading order comes out right, but right is not the same as comfortable. Pages such as interceptor sizing and cleaning cost are the worst offenders. Where possible, the conclusion is stated in a sentence above the table, so the table confirms an answer instead of being the only route to it.
The second is source material published by other people. Much of what gets cited here lives on outside servers: municipal ordinance PDFs scanned crooked years ago, sewer authority forms with no tagging at all, manufacturer sheets released as flat images. Those files are often unusable with a screen reader, and Silverbeck cannot repair them. What can be done is to quote the figure, the section number and the date in accessible text on our own page, so a citation stays checkable even when the original is not readable. The sourcing practice behind that is set out in the editorial policy.
Telling us something is broken
Write to desk@silverbeckworks.com and put the word barrier at the front of the subject line. Useful details are the page address, the step that failed, and the browser, device and assistive technology in use. One line describing what happened is enough. A screenshot or screen recording helps, and is never required.
Here is what follows. The editorial desk reads every message and answers within five business days. Small fixes, a stylesheet correction or a missing alt attribute, get made and you get told when the change is live. Structural problems get an honest estimate of what will change and roughly when, rather than a note filing your report as a known issue. When something cannot be fixed, usually because it sits inside a document Silverbeck did not publish, that is said plainly and the content is supplied another way.
The contact page lists the same address. Accessibility reports travel better by email than by phone, since the line published on this site connects to a partner service company rather than to the desk, and reports sent there cannot be tracked.
What this page stops short of claiming
None of the above is a statement of legal compliance. Silverbeck makes no claim of conformance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, with Section 508, or with any state or municipal accessibility requirement, and this page is not a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template.
It is a description of the work that was done, the standard being aimed at, the gaps already known, and the way to report the ones nobody has caught yet.
Reviewed by the Silverbeck Editorial Desk. Effective September 7, 2026.