Making Our Site Easier For Everyone To Use

We value everyone being able to access our site, so after our own internal accessibility audit we have gone back through every public page and rebuilt the parts that were getting in people's way. The review covered the homepage, the catalogue and search, track pages, artist profiles, licensing and policy pages, plus all of the sign up, log in and password pages. It turned up far more than we expected. Rather than patching one or two complaints, we worked through the whole list and fixed the underlying causes in our shared templates, so the improvements now apply everywhere at once.

For anyone using a screen reader, the biggest change is that nothing is left unnamed any more. Every icon, logo and decorative graphic is either given a proper description or hidden from assistive technology entirely, so it no longer interrupts with announcements that mean nothing. Each form field across the site, from the search box to the artist application, now has a real, programmatically associated label rather than relying on placeholder text that vanishes the moment you start typing. Track titles, artist credits, dates and playlist rows are now read out in a sensible order, and the playback controls on track, category and browse pages announce what they do instead of just saying "button".

We also sorted out the structure of our pages, which matters far more than it sounds. Every page now has one clear main heading and a logical sequence beneath it, with proper page regions so people can jump straight to the navigation, the main content or the footer. Where we had tables being used purely for layout, we replaced them with ordinary page structure, and where we had buttons being drawn as plain text, we turned them into real, keyboard accessible controls. Forms that previously submitted the moment you touched a dropdown now wait for you to press a button, so you cannot be thrown onto a new page by accident.

Colour contrast has been tightened throughout. Several buttons, badges and small print elements that looked fine on a large monitor were genuinely hard to read, so we darkened those backgrounds and texts until they comfortably pass the WCAG AA contrast ratios. We have also made sure that colour is never the only thing telling you something, with icons and wording carrying the same meaning. On top of that we removed a large number of duplicated and empty links: where a card used to send you to the same track twice, or an entire block was clickable but announced nothing at all, there is now a single, clearly named link that says exactly where it goes.

One change worth calling out on its own is our translation tool. It used to load in the background on every single page, quietly injecting its own interface and a set of unlabelled controls that made life harder for assistive technology. It is still there and still covers over fifty languages, but it now only loads when you actually choose a language from the selector in the footer, so a normal visit stays clean and fast. We have also rebuilt our cookie options panel so the choices are properly grouped and labelled, and improved the contrast of the cookie banner prompt. After all of this, our automated accessibility checks now come back completely clean on every public page we reviewed, with no errors, no contrast problems and no warnings. Automated checks never tell the whole story, so we will keep reviewing by hand and testing with real assistive technology. If you hit anything that is still awkward to use, please tell us through the contact form and we will put it right.