Accessibility isn't a checklist — it's a design constraint
How we're approaching WCAG 2.1 AA, captions for avatar lessons, keyboard navigation, and what we still need to fix.
Accessibility is often described as a feature, or worse, as compliance work — something you do after the product is built to avoid liability. We treat it as a design constraint from the first wireframe, and that distinction changes everything about how decisions get made.
Avatars pose an interesting accessibility challenge that you don't face with text content. They speak. They gesture. They deliver instruction through a combination of audio, visual, and on-screen text that assumes you can process all three streams simultaneously. That's not a safe assumption.
Every avatar lesson on skills123 ships with four accessibility layers: synchronized captions (generated by Deepgram, reviewed for accuracy), a full transcript available before you even start the video, a downloadable PDF version for offline reading, and keyboard-navigable player controls that work identically for screen readers and mouse users.
"Accessibility is a design constraint, not a polish pass. It shapes every decision from the first prototype — not a compliance audit at the end."
— Design Team
The sign language track is on the roadmap. It's a significant rendering and storage challenge with our current pipeline, but we've prototyped a workflow and it's coming. We don't have a date we're comfortable committing to publicly, which is exactly why it's not on the pricing page yet.
Key Insight
The sign language track is on the roadmap. It's a significant rendering and storage challenge with our current pipeline, but we've prototyped a workflow and it's coming. We don't have a date we're comfortable committing to publicly, which is exactly why it's not on the pricing page yet.
Keyboard navigation covers every interactive surface. We audit focus states on every PR using a simple rule: tab through the whole page and never lose the focus ring. Our design tokens include a high-contrast mode that inverts the brand palette without breaking the visual language.
Color contrast is audited programmatically at build time. We use a lighthouse step in CI that will block a merge if any text falls below WCAG AA ratio. It occasionally catches regressions and occasionally annoys designers who chose a beautiful color that turns out to be 3.8:1 instead of 4.5:1.
We're not perfect. Our course creation UI failed a recent keyboard audit — too many custom dropdown patterns that break Tab flow. It's tracked, it's prioritized, and it will be fixed before the next major release. If you find an issue we haven't found, the accessibility page has a direct reporting mechanism.
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