Accessibility — MeraLearn

Our target

MeraLearn aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA, on this website, in the student app and on the teacher dashboard. We check ourselves against it; no one outside MeraLearn has audited it yet.

What is in place

Any screen. A round fits on one screen without scrolling, checked on sizes from a small phone (360 × 640) up to a desktop monitor.
Big targets. Answers are large square tiles, one row across, sized to the screen.
Not colour alone. A right or wrong answer is shown with an icon as well as a colour.
Readable over pictures. Text over a teacher's background picture always sits on a dark wash, whatever the picture is.
Sound is optional. There is a mute button and a volume slider, and the game is fully playable in silence.
Read aloud. In every game, a button in the corner opposite the sound button reads the question and its choices aloud with your device's own voice. Press it again to stop.
Zoom. Both apps can be pinch-zoomed, and a quick double tap in a game does not zoom by accident.
PINs that read well from afar. Session PINs leave out characters that are easy to confuse, like 0 and O, or 1 and I.
This website follows your system's light or dark setting and has a switch to change it. It respects reduced-motion settings (the moving background, the reveals and the playable round all hold still), and it has a pause button in the header, or in the menu on a phone, that holds everything that moves by itself still on any device: the background, the scrolling words and the changing game pictures. It starts with a link that skips to the content and shows a clear outline around whatever has keyboard focus. The playable round on the homepage announces each answer to a screen reader and can be played with the keyboard. The silent trailer on the Games page has its story written out beside it.

Timed play

The games are timed on purpose, and that will not suit every student. Teachers choose a round length between 1 and 10 minutes, and self-paced sessions let a student play again as often as they like. Accuracy counts only the cards a student answered, so running out of time is never marked as wrong answers.

Self-check, 17 October 2026

We ran the automated WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 level A and AA rules of axe-core 4.10, in light and in dark mode (the games have one look, so once), on:

This website: all nine pages, as they were before the redesign. The new pages were checked again, below.
The student app, at phone size: the sign-in screens, the board, Your topics, the games list and a game's page, the profile, the report and the history, and the start screen and a round of each of the six games.
The teacher dashboard: sign-in, the overview, subjects, a topic, a set of terms, a Role Player sheet, the library, the teachers' board, classes, students, sessions as a list and as a calendar, launching a session, a session and its projector view, settings, admin and the bin.

It found these, and we fixed them the same day:

Both apps stopped pinch-zoom on many phones.
Some icon buttons, progress bars, game counters and a slider had no name a screen reader would read.
Some text was too faint against its background, in five places.
Two sets of tabs pointed at a panel that was not there.
Switches, checkboxes, one folding heading and one back button failed the rule that a tap target is at least 24 pixels.
One scrolling list could not be reached with the keyboard.

After the fixes those screens passed every one of those rules.

Website re-check, 18 October 2026

The website was redesigned on 18 October 2026, so we checked the new pages again. The same axe-core 4.10 rules (WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 level A and AA, and its best-practice rules) ran on all nine pages, in light and in dark mode, at 1280 and 375 pixels wide, and with reduced motion on. They also ran on the parts that change when you use them: the phone menu, each game in the hero's switcher, each of the four tasters at its start, in the middle of a round and at its result, each step of the three-moves lesson, and each page of the dashboard tour. After the fixes below, axe found nothing to fix. That includes its rule that a tap target is at least 24 pixels, or has enough space around it.

axe cannot see through the glossy cards and the moving background, so it could not judge most of the text. We measured it ourselves: every line of text on those pages and in those states, against the pixels really behind it, with the page held still. No line falls below the ratio, 4.5 to 1 or 3 to 1 for large text, over the background it normally sits on. Where a piece of the moving background drifts behind a line, the contrast there can dip a little; we made those pieces fainter and the small grey text stronger to keep that rare, and the pause button holds them still.

We tabbed through every page in both modes at both widths, 1,176 stops in all, and compared the screen with and without focus. The first stop on every page is the skip link, nothing hidden can take focus, and every stop shows an outline you can see. Each outline measured at least 3 to 1 against what it touches, except on two tightly packed sets of controls, the game switcher in the hero and the game tabs in the taster, where it measured a little lower against the control right beside it. It is plain to see there too.

At 320 pixels wide, the width a 1280 pixel screen shrinks to at 400% zoom, no page scrolls sideways or cuts anything off. With the text spacing settings of WCAG 1.4.12 applied (taller lines, wider letters and words, more space between paragraphs), nothing is clipped or pushed off the screen.

The checks found these, and we fixed them the same day:

Links inside the text were too faint in light mode.
Small grey text was too faint in dark mode, and the moving background could make it fainter still.
A few labels were white on bright colours: the topic tags and one button.
The skip link on the homepage went nowhere, and the footer headings skipped a level.
The trailer and the game code box showed no focus outline you could see, and the footer links faded theirs.
The table on the privacy page scrolls sideways on a phone but could not be reached with the keyboard.
On phones narrower than about 390 pixels the header was wider than the screen and cut off its theme button, and on the smallest the game picker overflowed too.
The game pictures hidden in the hero were still read out by screen readers.
The silent trailer had no text alternative.
Nothing could pause the moving parts, short of changing a system setting.

App re-check, 19 October 2026

On 19 October 2026 both apps took on the website's new look, so we checked them again. The same axe-core 4.10 rules (WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 level A and AA, and its best-practice rules) ran on 31 screens, in light and in dark mode, at 1280 and 375 pixels wide. In the student app: the sign-in screen, making an account, the board, Your topics, the games list and a game's page, the profile, the report, the history, the code box and a Role Player sheet. In the teacher dashboard: sign-in, asking for access, the overview, subjects, a subject, a unit, a topic, a set of terms, sessions as a list and as a calendar, launching a session, classes, a class, students, a student, settings, the library, the teachers' board, the bin and admin. After the fixes below, axe found nothing to fix.

We measured every line of text on those screens against the pixels really behind it, and none falls below 4.5 to 1, or 3 to 1 for large text. We tabbed through every screen in both modes at both widths, 1,604 stops in all, and every stop shows an outline you can see. Each measured at least 3 to 1 against what it touches, with two exceptions we looked at: the Cards and List switch on Your topics, where in dark mode the outline measures lower against the chosen button right beside it, and the round sound button, whose outline is two colours, white inside dark, so one of them stands out on any background. At 320 pixels wide no screen scrolls sideways. The games keep their own look: a game's start screen was compared before and after, pixel for pixel, and was the same. The one later change to a game's look is described in part two, below.

The checks found these, and we fixed them the same day:

Many focus outlines were too faint, or too close in colour to what was beside them: on tabs, view switches, the yellow lesson card, a game's banner and the sound button. They are now the website's deeper purple, or the banner's own text colour.
Some controls showed no outline at all: two edit buttons on the students pages appeared only under the mouse, and a library card showed only an underline.
In the teacher dashboard, 34 buttons sat inside links, so the keyboard stopped on each one twice.
The sign-in screens of both apps, the history and the Role Player sheet had no main region, and the account page and a game's page had no main heading.
The scene on a Role Player sheet was marked up in a way a screen reader could not follow as a list.
The profile scrolled sideways on the narrowest phones.
Four pieces of small text were too faint: the example codes in two code boxes, a "No recent activity" tag and a note beside a student's code.

App re-check, part two, 22 October 2026

The first app re-check left out three things, so we checked them: a Role Player mission and its cue cards, the results screen after a round, and a teacher's public page. The same axe-core 4.10 rules ran on 26 states, in light and in dark mode, at 1280 and 375 pixels wide: a mission at its start, after a choice, and at the end of a good and of a poor run; the cue cards, first, in the middle and last; a sheet after it is handed in; the results screen for each rank, with the notice that a teacher ended the round and the one that it could not be saved, its leaderboard, its history and its study cards; a teacher's public page, signed out and signed in; the editor for that page; and, in the teacher dashboard, a mission's Try it, Edit and Add dialogs. After the fixes below, axe found nothing to fix.

We measured every line of text on those screens against the pixels really behind it. Every one is at or above 4.5 to 1, or 3 to 1 for large text, except one the check flagged and we left alone: the example text in the mission editor's title box. Read directly, its colour is 7 to 1 on its background; the measurement caught it while the dialog was still fading in. We tabbed through all 26 states in both modes at both widths, 1,016 stops in all. Every stop shows an outline you can see, at least 3 to 1 against what it touches, with one exception, the round sound button, whose outline is two colours, white inside dark, so that one of them shows on any background. At 320 pixels wide none of them scrolls sideways.

The checks found these, and we fixed them the same day:

On the results screen the heading, the rank, the tab names and the study-mode text were dim against the dark background, and the small text on the orange and green buttons was too faint. White on Speed Sort's orange is 3.5 to 1, so Speed Sort's orange buttons now have dark text, as the other five games already did. That is the one change to a game's look.
Every button on the results screen, and the Exit button during a round, took two presses of the Tab key: the first stopped on an invisible wrapper.
The study cards could not be turned over from the keyboard.
The results screen had no main region, study mode had no main heading, and its two arrow buttons had no names.
The tabs and sort buttons on the results screen showed no focus outline. The cue cards' scrolling area and a sheet's answer choices showed one too faint, and the Close button on a dialog faded its outline in.
In the teacher's mission editor, the two dropdowns for each choice had no names.

Website re-check, part two, 23 October 2026

On 23 October 2026 the homepage was shortened: the three-moves lesson, the dashboard tour and the tiles for games that are still being built came off it, and the part written for students moved to its own page, For students. The same axe-core 4.10 rules (WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 level A and AA, and its best-practice rules) ran on both pages, in light and in dark mode. Nothing on either page is new — every part of the student page was already on the homepage, and had been checked there — and axe found nothing to fix. At 320 pixels wide neither page scrolls sideways.

The 18 October check above still describes the homepage as it was, including the lesson and the dashboard tour that are no longer on it.

Where it falls short

Automated rules find only part of what can go wrong. This is our own check, not an independent audit.
MeraLearn has not been tested with a screen reader, and a timed sorting game may be hard to play with one.
The website and app checks ran in one browser, Chromium, on a desktop. We did not try other browsers or real phones.
A student cannot pause or lengthen a class round. Only the teacher sets its length.
Playing a Role Player sheet as one of a pair (the partner's card), and the form on a teacher's public page for asking to join a class, were not part of these checks.

Tell us about a problem

If something gets in a student's way, email us with what happened, on which device, and on which screen. Problems that stop someone playing are fixed first.