Accessibility

What the app does so that everyone can play it, and the rules new code must follow.

The board is a real table

The playground is a semantic <table>: column headers (A, B, C...) and row headers (1, 2, 3...) announce coordinates, and every cell is a <td> with an accessible name. Each cell also carries a title and a screen-reader-only label for its contents (ground, wall, ice, lava, hole, target, player), so a screen reader can describe the whole board without the visuals.

Names and labels

• Every icon-only control has an accessible name: the export button (aria-label + title), the collapse toggles, the skin and language switchers.
• Status and outcome messages are text, not colour alone; the outcome modal spells out the result (won, blocked, not reached, trapped, infinite loop).
• Focus states are styled (focus-visible) on every interactive element, including the shared BlockCollapseToggle.

Keyboard

• The whole game is operable by mouse, touch and keyboard: blocks are placed by dragging, but every program edit is a drop target and every control is a real <button>.
• Dragging can be cancelled with Escape at any time (the drag session listens for it and for pointercancel).
• The client router keeps real <a href> anchors, so links work with keyboard, middle-click and assistive tech.

Motion

• Only the player and the lava animate; nothing else moves on its own.
• prefers-reduced-motion disables the player and lava animations, and the death effects.
• Turns always rotate the shortest way, so the mouse never spins disorientingly.

Contrast and legibility

• Colours come from semantic tokens with tested pairs (content on surface, washed block bodies over terrain, error text on raised surfaces), not raw palette values.
• Text scales with the viewport via clamp(), and the level picker and modals use readable type sizes at every breakpoint.

What is deliberately out of scope today

There is no dedicated focus-management for drag and drop (placing blocks by keyboard alone), and no screen-reader announcements during the run animation. Both are tracked honestly on Known issues and gaps.

Next: Testing.