Accessibility statement.

What we are aiming at

Gearhold LLC runs fixedgearstraps.com. We want the site to work for anyone who wants to buy a strap, whatever they are reading it with. The standard we measure ourselves against is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 at Level AA.

That is a target, not a boast. The sections below say where we meet it and where we do not, with numbers wherever we have numbers.

This statement covers every page on fixedgearstraps.com, including these legal documents. There is no separate mobile app, no customer portal and no other site. It does not cover the websites of the type foundries whose fonts we load, which are theirs, or Stripe’s checkout page at buy.stripe.com, where Buy now takes you to pay, which Stripe builds and runs.

Conformance status

In plain EnglishParts of this site meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA and parts of it do not, so we cannot claim full conformance.

This site is partially conformant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Partially conformant means most of the content meets the standard and some of it does not yet.

Remaining limitations include very small interface labels and incomplete testing of reflow, text spacing and assistive technology. Section 8.0 lists them. Contrast, skip links, main landmarks, motion, form announcements and mobile menu focus were updated on 29 Oct 2026.

We have not completed a full WCAG conformance assessment or published an accessibility conformance report. This statement records our own assessment; it is not a certification.

How we checked

We read our own source line by line, walked the site with a keyboard, resized and zoomed the pages, and put the two suspect colors through a contrast calculator. That is the whole method.

Checking your own work by hand catches the obvious failures and misses the subtle ones. Treat this page as incomplete rather than final, and tell us what we missed.

What works today

Stated concretely, so you can check any of it yourself.

• —The page language is declared as English, so a screen reader picks the right voice and pronunciation instead of guessing.
• —Headings run in order. A page title, then section headings under it, with no level skipped to get a smaller font.
• —Every control that does something is a real button or a real link. Nothing important is a plain box listening for a click, so the keyboard, the browser and assistive technology all treat a control as the control it looks like.
• —Form fields sit inside real label elements. Tapping the label puts you in the field, and the field announces its own name.
• —Images carry alt text that somebody wrote by hand for that image. Decorative marks, like the outlined word behind a page title or the dash drawn before a list item, are hidden from assistive technology rather than read out as noise.
• —The tables in these legal documents use real column headers with a scope, not bold text pretending to be a header.
• —Text is real text, never a picture of words, so it answers to your own font settings and your own stylesheet.
• —In the reading content, color is not the only thing carrying meaning. Where orange marks something out, a word or its position says the same thing. Keyboard focus used to be the exception on the quote form, where a border changed color and nothing else changed with it. Every focused control now draws an outline as well, so there is a shape to see and not just a hue. 5.0 has the detail.
• —The pages are rendered to plain HTML before they reach you. Headings, body text, links and images are there whether or not scripting runs. Submitting order, quote and contact forms needs JavaScript. Email and phone remain available for the same requests.
• —Nothing times out. There is no account, login or cart to expire, and the inquiry forms use no captcha. Take as long on a page as you like.
• —There is no audio and no video anywhere on the site, so there is nothing that needs captions, a transcript or an audio description.
• —A “Skip to content” link appears before the site content on every page, and every page has a main landmark, including legal pages. A fresh Termly consent banner can place its provider link before the skip link in keyboard order; section 8.0 records this limitation.
• —The “Chat with the bench” control is a real keyboard-focusable button with a visible focus ring.

Keyboard and focus

You can reach the controls with Tab and operate them with Enter or Space, because they are the elements the browser already knows how to drive. We did not rebuild that behavior, so there is less of it to get wrong.

You can see where you are. One rule draws an outline around whatever control you have tabbed to, two pixels thick and held a little off the edge of the thing it marks, and it applies to every focusable control on the site. It is drawn for keyboard focus only, so clicking something with a mouse does not put a ring around it.

Orange text on light backgrounds now uses #B83700, measured at 5.1:1 on the page background and 4.6:1 on darker panels. Muted labels measure at least 4.7:1. The chat button is keyboard-focusable and has a visible focus ring. These changes do not establish full WCAG conformance.

The quote form used to be the hole in this, and it was a real failure rather than a rough edge. Its text fields, its notes box and its two dropdowns switched the browser outline off in their own styles, so focus showed as a border going grey to orange on the fields and as nothing at all on the dropdowns. That is fixed. The rule overrides those controls whatever their own styles say, and they draw the same outline as everything else now. This is a recent change, not something that was always right. The border still turns orange on the fields, which is a second cue on top of a ring rather than the only one there is.

On a narrow screen the menu opens as a full-screen dialog. The menu button announces whether it is expanded and identifies the panel it controls. Opening it moves focus into the panel. Tab and Shift+Tab stay inside while it is open. Escape, the close button or following a menu link closes it and returns focus to the menu button.

What we have not done is walk every page of the site from top to bottom on the keyboard alone. If you find a control you cannot reach or cannot get back out of, that is a bug and we want the report.

Text size, zoom and reflow

The layout is fluid rather than fixed. On a narrow screen it collapses to a single column instead of making you scroll sideways, and type sizes scale with the width of the window rather than sitting at one hard-coded size.

Zoom works. The page holds together when you enlarge it and the reading content stays in one column. We have not measured the site against the Level AA reflow requirement of 400 percent zoom with no two-dimensional scrolling, so treat that criterion as untested rather than passed.

If you set your own minimum font size or apply your own stylesheet, the reading content survives it. We have not tested the site against the WCAG text-spacing overrides for line height, letter spacing, word spacing and paragraph spacing.

Motion

In plain EnglishReduced motion disables automatic decorative movement. With no reduced-motion preference, automatic marquees and cog animations stop after five seconds.

When your system requests reduced motion, internal links navigate without the curtain transition, the 3D cog stays still unless you drag it, and the quote summary and back-to-top control scroll instantly. Automatic marquee, spin and float animations are disabled. The 3D cog does not float, rotate with scrolling or tilt toward the pointer under this setting.

Without a reduced-motion preference, the shared motion engine stops repeating decorative animations after five seconds, including marquees and flat cog marks. The 3D cog also stops automatic spinning, floating, scroll rotation and pointer tilt within five seconds. You can still drag it. Nothing on the site flashes or strobes.

Known issues, measured

The remaining interface-label measurement is below. Orange text and muted-label contrast failures were addressed on 29 Oct 2026: #B83700 measures 5.1:1 on the page background and 4.6:1 on darker panels; muted labels measure at least 4.7:1.

The rest of what we know is open but not measurable in the same way.

• —The site has not been checked against the Level AA reflow requirement at 400 percent zoom.
• —WCAG text-spacing overrides have not been tested across the site.
• —No structured screen-reader, voice-control, screen-magnifier, braille-display or switch-input testing has been completed.
• —The Termly consent interface and tawk.to chat interface have not been included in our contrast and focus measurements.
• —With a fresh Termly consent banner, the first Tab can focus the provider link before the skip link. Browser checks confirmed this on desktop and mobile on 29 Oct 2026.

Where the problems concentrate

The home page contains the most decorative motion, including the 3D cog and marquee. Automatic movement now stops within five seconds and reduced motion disables it. Small uppercase labels remain throughout the site.

The quote and contact forms mark invalid fields and connect each field error to its control. Error banners are announced as alerts. Result panels use a polite status announcement and move focus to their heading, including when a request was saved but email delivery failed. Screen-reader testing of the complete flow remains to be done. Email and phone provide the same order, quote and contact services.

The product pages sit in the middle. Plain layout, real labels, ordinary reading text, and the same orange accents and small uppercase labels as everything else.

These legal documents are the cleanest part of the site. They are the most conservatively typeset thing we publish: one column, body text at a readable size, headings in order, tables with real headers, almost no motion. If you want the facts without the decoration, start here or pick up the phone.

Assistive technology

The honest answer first. No formal screen-reader audit has been carried out on this site. Nobody has worked through every page with a structured test plan, and we are not going to imply otherwise by listing software we have merely opened once.

What we have done: keyboard-only navigation, browser zoom, narrow-screen layout checks, and reading the markup to confirm that the controls, labels, headings and alt text are what they claim to be.

What we have not done: any testing with a desktop or mobile screen reader, with voice control, with a screen magnifier, with a braille display or with switch input.

So if you use any of those and something here is broken, your report is worth more to us than any tool we could run against ourselves. Section 12.0 says how to send it.

Fonts and third-party content

Three typefaces load from outside this site, two from Google Fonts and one from Fontshare. If those requests are blocked or fail, the text falls back to fonts already on your machine and every word is still there. Nothing on this site is readable only in a particular typeface.

There is no embedded map, no video player, no social feed and no captcha. Two third-party interfaces do appear, and their accessibility belongs to their providers rather than to us: the cookie-consent banner and its preferences dialog (Termly), and the chat widget (tawk.to), which loads after a Termly Performance-category opt-in or a click on “Chat with the bench”. The contrast, focus and labeling inside those two are outside the measurements on this page. If either one blocks you, tell us — we will raise it with the provider and work around it with you. Apart from those two and the font files, there is nothing on the page whose accessibility belongs to somebody else. Buy now leaves this site for Stripe’s hosted checkout, which is Stripe’s interface; 13.0 gives the other ways to order if it gets in your way.

Loading a font does send your IP address to those providers. That is a privacy matter rather than an accessibility one, and /legal/privacy sets it out in full.

Telling us about a barrier

If something on this site stopped you, tell us. We would rather hear it from you than not know.

Email hello@fixedgearstraps.com or call +1 (762) 760-1179. The bench is open Tue–Sat 10–18 ET.

What helps us reproduce it:

• —The page you were on, or what you were trying to do if the address has gone.
• —The browser and device, roughly. Chrome on an Android phone is enough detail.
• —The assistive technology you use, if you use one, and its version if you happen to know it.
• —What happened, and what you expected to happen instead.
• —A screenshot or a short recording, if that is easier than describing it. Neither is required.

What comes back: we read email on bench days, so a message sent on a Sunday or Monday is picked up on Tuesday. A person answers it, not an autoresponder. We are not going to print a turnaround time we cannot keep on a five-day bench week, so here is the useful version instead. Every message gets read. If two weeks pass with nothing back, assume it went astray and call the number above. Where a fix is straightforward we will tell you when it ships. Where it is not, we will say so plainly and tell you how to get the same thing done in the meantime.

There is no support desk and no ticket number here. There is a bench, a phone and an inbox.

The route that works today

Everything this website does, a person can do for you instead. That is not a consolation prize. It is how most orders happen here anyway.

• —Prices, sizes, colorways, what a strap is made of and which one suits your pedals: ask on the phone or by email and you get a straight answer.
• —A volume quote: email quotes@fixedgearstraps.com or call. The quote form now sends a request; email and phone reach the same bench and provide the same service. A written quote holds its price for 14 days.
• —An order: Buy now opens Stripe’s hosted checkout, which Stripe builds and maintains, so its accessibility is Stripe’s work, not ours. If it does not work for you, send an order request through /quote, by email or by phone instead; each route gets a personal reply with the confirmed total, shipping and how to pay, at the same prices.
• —A guarantee claim or a 30-day fit swap: email or call, or simply post the strap to us with a note in the envelope.
• —Any document on this site, this one included, in a form you can actually use. Ask and we will send it as plain text in an email or read it to you down the phone. No format request is too much trouble and none of them cost anything.

Phone +1 (762) 760-1179, Tue–Sat 10–18 ET. Email hello@fixedgearstraps.com for anything, quotes@fixedgearstraps.com for wholesale. Post: Gearhold LLC, 104 S Cherry St, Tunnel Hill, GA 30755, USA.

If a phone call is not workable for you, say so in an email and we will keep the whole thing in writing.

Formal complaints

In plain EnglishYou can take this to a regulator, and you do not have to come to us first, though we would rather you did.

In the United States the Americans with Disabilities Act is the law that covers access to a business like ours, and the Department of Justice takes complaints under it. Several states have their own accessibility and civil rights laws on top of that. Outside the United States, most countries have an equality or accessibility body that will take a complaint about a website.

We ship worldwide, so it is worth saying what we have not done. We have not assessed this site against EN 301 549, the standard European accessibility rules point at, and we have not measured it against any national requirement outside the United States. WCAG 2.1 AA is the only yardstick we have used, and 2.0 says how far short of it we fall.

Nothing on this page limits that right and nothing here asks you to give it up. We would still rather hear from you first, because a barrier we can fix in an afternoon should not need a regulator to get it fixed.

Review and revision

This statement was written on 15 Aug 2026 and revised on 30 Oct 2026. Remaining limitations and test gaps are listed in 8.0. The third-party interfaces are outside our contrast measurements.

We intend to review it every twelve months, and sooner whenever we change the front end in a way that touches color, motion, layout or forms. When something on the list in 8.0 is fixed, the row comes off and the date at the top of this page changes. If that date has gone stale, that is a fault worth reporting as well.

29 Oct 2026: updated contrast, skip links, main landmarks and chat focus. Added mobile menu expanded state, Escape close and focus management; connected form errors to controls and focused result headings; respected reduced motion for navigation, the 3D cog and scrolling; limited automatic repeating motion to five seconds. Small labels, reflow and text-spacing checks, assistive-technology testing and third-party interface checks remain open. These changes do not establish full WCAG conformance.