Accessibility

Last reviewed 5 August 2026

The people most likely to need a beach-safety app are often the people least well served by one. So this page is written the way we'd want to read it: what works, what doesn't, and no claims we can't back.

What we're aiming at

WCAG 2.1 Level AA. That's the target, not a claim of conformance. We haven't had a full independent audit, so anyone telling you this app is "WCAG compliant" is guessing. When we've been audited, this page will say so and give the date.

What works today

Text scales with your browser or phone's text-size setting.
Beach names, conditions, and ratings are real text in the page, not baked into images.
The safety notice can be reached by keyboard and is exposed as a labeled region.
A conditions rating always carries a word — Calm, Moderate, Rough, Big surf — so you never have to read a color to get the verdict.

Where we fall short

Plainly, so you can plan around it:

The map is the weak spot. Panning, zooming, and tapping pins is hard or impossible with a screen reader or by keyboard alone. Map pins are also colored by hazard, and that color has no text beside it. Every beach on the map is also in the beach list, which is text — use the list. Hazard pins are a separate layer and are not fully mirrored there.
The swell and rain overlays are visual only. The conditions text underneath carries the same verdict in words.
Two images in the app render with no alt text — a beach photo and a partner logo. Both are decorative next to text that carries the same information, but they should be labeled and they aren't yet.
We have not run a contrast audit. The palette was chosen for outdoor legibility, not measured against WCAG ratios. Treat contrast as unverified until this page says otherwise.

We are not going to install an accessibility overlay widget. Practitioners who do this work have been clear that overlays tend to make things worse, and an overlay would break the offline-first design this app depends on.

Tell us

If something is unusable, we want to know — especially anything touching a safety verdict. That's a bug, not a feature request, and we'll treat it that way.

aloha@oceansafety.app

We're a small team, so we won't promise you a number of days. What we will promise is order: anything blocking access to safety information goes to the front of the line.

Tropical Agronomics LLC dba OceanSafe
4489 Panihi Rd, Kapaʻa, HI 96746