Accessibility
We want to make our site accessible to all and easy to read. Here’s how we do that and how to tell us when we fall short.
- Effective
- September 1, 2026
1What we are aiming for
At Synonym magazine, we believe great storytelling should reach everyone. We’re committed to making our website accessible and usable for all readers, including people with disabilities, and we work to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at the AA level.
2What the site does
Every page opens with a Skip link that takes you straight to content. This enables a keyboard or screen reader to bypass the masthead and navigation in one keystroke.
Everything you can do with a mouse you can do with a keyboard, and the element you have landed on is always visibly marked — we underline focused links to show which one you’ve selected rather than removing the browser’s outline and leaving you to guess.
The site is set in real text, not pictures of text. It reflows and stays readable when you zoom the page or raise your browser’s minimum font size, and it works at the widths of a phone as well as a desktop.
Pages are built from ordinary headings, lists, and landmarks in the right order, so a screen reader can move through a story by its structure instead of reading it end to end.
If your system asks for reduced motion, the site listens. All the animation on the site — the hero fade, scroll effects, filter transitions, etc. — is disabled at the source. Nothing on the site moves, flashes, or autoplays without you asking it to.
Photographs and artwork carry alternative text written by an editor, and images that are purely adornment are marked as “decorative” so that a screen reader will pass over them rather than reading a filename aloud.
Film never plays by itself. A video is a still frame until you press play. For films hosted on Vimeo or YouTube, nothing is requested from those services — no player, cookies, or connection — unless you request them yourself. With JavaScript turned off, the control is still a link and will still open the film.
3Third-party services
Parts of this site are provided by other companies: Memberful supports our membership and sign-in capabilities, Shopify supports our shop and checkout functions, and Vimeo and YouTube allow for film. We choose who we work with, but we do not control the accessibility of what they serve, so we cannot directly fix or adjust anything that falls under their domain. We can, and do, pass problems on.
4Tell us
If any part of this site keeps you from reading something, we want to know, and a short note is enough — the page you were on, what happened, and what you were using to read it, if you know.
Write us at info@synonym-mag.com. We aim to reply within five working days. If we think the fix is going to take longer, we will say so and make every effort to provide you with a workaround in the meantime.
