Our Omoiyari Statement

Omoiyari (oh-moh-ee-yah-ree): anticipating the needs of others before they have to ask, empathy in action without expectation of reward or praise, selflessness, fostering social harmony by keeping collective well-being in mind.

Access is a design practice, not a checklist.

Accessibility is central to what Open World Design is for. This page describes what this website currently does, where we are still working, and how to reach us if something on it gets in your way.

Our conformance target

Our philosophy and practice is to exceed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Level AA. Accessibility is treated as a continuous practice on this site — not a one-time audit — and we welcome feedback from the people who use assistive technology every day.

What this site does today

• Skip link — the first keyboard tab stop on every page jumps directly to the main content.
• Semantic landmarks — a single <main>, labelled navigation, and a logical heading order on every page.
• Keyboard access — every interactive control is reachable and operable with the keyboard, with a clearly visible focus ring.
• Reduced motion — the immersive entrance, background transitions, and scroll cues respect prefers-reduced-motion and the Motion setting in the utility bar.
• Sound as enhancement — no content requires sound. Audio cues stay off until you press Enter, and off by default when your system prefers reduced motion. A persistent toggle lets you turn them on or off at any time.
• Text & contrast controls — a persistent "Make this site your own" panel adjusts contrast and text size and remembers your choices on this device.
• Alternatives on media — every story in the Perception Library ships with captions and a transcript, with audio description where the medium calls for it.
• Forms — every field is labelled, errors and status are announced to assistive technology, and no form pretends to succeed when it has not.

Where we are still working

A few areas are candid open work:

• Automated intake — several forms currently open your email client rather than saving to a backend. We tell you when that happens instead of claiming a submission that did not occur.
• Third-party content (fonts, embedded video) is loaded from services that may set their own cookies. See our privacy page.
• Additional language translations of core pages are on the roadmap.

Tell us what's in your way

If a page, control, story, or form on this site is difficult or impossible to use with your assistive technology or setup, we want to know. Lived expertise shapes what we fix and in what order.

This statement was last reviewed on the date of the most recent deployment. It will be updated as the site changes.