We pointed our accessibility tools at our own sites, and one of them called unreadable text a pass

October 24, 2026

On October 24, 2026 I ran our own accessibility and design tools over every site we run, from the studio home page to the Vantage login. Then I opened each serious finding in a real Chrome and checked it against what the page does, at desktop width and at 320 pixels, using the accessibility tree, elementFromPoint, a keyboard walk and reduced motion. The tools are mine, so how well they did is part of what I was testing.

76 findings survived the browser: 6 high, 37 medium, 33 low. Many are one cause repeated across products, because our sites share a component kit, and one kit commit plus a redeploy of each site removed roughly 30 of them.

The worst one was marked as passing

The home pages of Preflight and Design Check have a dark section with a list of what the product looks for. The text in that list was black at 60% opacity on a near-black background, a contrast ratio of 1.04:1. In the screenshot it is a blank panel. Our css_contrast_pairs tool reported the same list as 5.74:1 and passing, because it assumed a white page behind the text and never saw the dark ancestor that sets the real background.

It is the most useful bug the audit turned up, and it is a bug in the tool, not the sites. The fix for the sites was four lines of CSS in the kit. The fix for the tool is to say "unverified" whenever it had to guess the background.

What only the browser caught

The Toolbox docs page had a table of contents with 19 links, every one of them sitting underneath the fixed header. Calling elementFromPoint at each link returned the header, so none of them could be clicked, and the body text ran the full width of a 1280 pixel screen with no margin. The page used two class names that no stylesheet defined. No tool flagged it, because nothing in the markup is invalid.

The same method found tool headings reading "010 Env scrubber" through "014 Tool lint" (a template that built the number as 0${i + 1}; Designers got as far as "0125 Design changelog"), a link on our home page to a GitHub repo that turned out to be private, and two text areas with no accessible name at all.

At 320 pixels, three home pages scrolled sideways to between 534 and 720 pixels because a code snippet or a table forced its grid parent open. Our reflow checker said those pages were fine.

What the tools got wrong the other way

I logged 14 bugs in our own tools, and most of them are false alarms. The type-scale checker said Preflight's body text was 13px, high severity; the computed size is 18.3px, set through a CSS variable and a clamp() it could not resolve. The state checker said several components had no focus style, and a Tab walk showed every one of them with the browser's default ring. The accessibility checker rated 18 placeholder-only inputs on Toolbox as high, when Chrome derives a name from the placeholder, so they are medium: the field has a name but the instruction vanishes as you type.

The slop detector found "game-changer", "seamlessly" and "empowers" on our docs pages. All three were sample text inside demo text areas, which is what the demos are for. It also counted nine eyebrow labels on the home page that turned out to be subtitles sitting after their headings in the page order.

I would not hand any of these tools to someone and say the output is the verdict. It is a list of places to look.

After

Fixes went out the same day: one change to the shared kit, then each product that uses it. I re-measured eleven live pages at 320 pixels afterward. None scrolls sideways, all have a language, a main landmark and one h1, no form control lacks a name, and the footer headings are h2. The Preflight list that measured 1.04:1 now measures about 19.8:1 by my own calculation. /favicon.ico still returns 404 on every site, and I did not re-measure Pulse or the Vantage login.

What this does not cover

An automated pass reaches a fraction of WCAG, and mine reached less. I did not use a screen reader. I did not test dark mode or 200% zoom, the panels that appear after you run a tool, or Vantage once you are signed in. Passing here means the checks I ran found nothing, and nobody has sat down with these sites and a screen reader yet. If you need a statement for the European Accessibility Act, that human pass is the part a statement actually rests on.

The same tools are in Designers and Design Check. Design Check runs free on pasted HTML with no signup, and I would start by pasting a page you already believe is fine.