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Accessibility statement.

What works, what does notEffective 20 Aug 2026
Index
Honesty noteWorking documents drafted at the bench, not by a lawyer. They describe what we actually do and they are written to be read, but they are not legal advice — have your own counsel read them before you rely on them.
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hello@fixedgearstraps.com
+1 (762) 760-1179

We aim at WCAG 2.1 Level AA and we are not there yet. This page lists what already works, names the parts that fail and by how much, and gives you a phone number and an email address that reach a person who can do anything the website does.

1.0
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.

2.0
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.

The gaps we know about are text contrast, a set of very small interface labels, motion that keeps running after you have asked for less of it, things that appear on screen without announcing themselves, and no quick way past the header that repeats on every page. They are listed in 8.0 with the measurements we have.

No outside firm has reviewed this site. There is no audit, no certification, no accessibility conformance report and no badge from a scanning tool. Everything on this page is our own assessment of our own work.

3.0
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.

4.0
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. The quote calculator is the one exception, and it is not how you send us a quote request anyway.
  • Nothing times out. There is no account, no login, no session, no cart to expire and no captcha to solve. 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.
5.0
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.

The ring is drawn in the text color of the thing it surrounds. On the paper background that is the near-black ink, which measures about 14:1 and clears the 3:1 a focus indicator needs several times over. On the dark footer it comes out paper-colored against the ink and is just as strong. The exception is anything set in signal orange, and some links are: there the ring is orange too and carries the same roughly 2.9:1 that 8.0 lists for orange on paper. Those spots are the weak ones. Everywhere else the ring is as plain as we know how to make it.

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 panel. It is a real button opening real links, and the closed panel is taken out of the page rather than parked off the side of it, so nothing invisible sits in your tab order. What it does not do is tell assistive technology whether it is open, move your focus into the panel, close on Escape, or hand focus back to the button afterwards. You can still work it. It takes more tabbing than it should.

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.

6.0
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.

7.0
Motion

In plain EnglishIf your system is set to reduce motion, most of the animation stops. Three things carry on regardless, and we know it.

The site respects the reduced-motion setting in your operating system. When it is on we switch off the scrolling marquee, the flat cog mark that spins, the floating elements, the reveal animations that fire as you scroll down a page, and the magnetic pull on the main buttons. Nothing on the site flashes or strobes at any setting.

What it does not switch off:

  • The dark curtain that wipes across the screen when you follow a link inside the site. It plays whatever your motion setting says.
  • The 3D cog on the home page. It reads the setting in its own code rather than through the rule that governs everything else, and it only goes half way: the idle spin and the orbiting ring stop, while the slow float carries on and the cog still turns as you scroll and tilts toward your pointer.
  • The slide down to the summary panel after you fill in the quote form, and the back-to-top control in the footer. Both glide rather than jump, whatever your setting says.

All three are ours, all three are wrong, and all three are on the list for the next round of front-end work. Until they are fixed, section 13.0 gets you the same information with no animation at all.

Separately: if you have not set a reduced-motion preference, the marquee and the cog run on their own. Holding a mouse pointer over a marquee strip does pause it, which is something, but it is mouse-only, nobody would guess it was there, and it does nothing for the cog. There is no button anywhere to pause or stop either one. WCAG treats that as a Level A matter rather than a Level AA one, which makes it the more serious motion problem here, not the lesser.

8.0
Known issues, measured

These are the failures we can put a number on. The measurements are ours, taken against the WCAG 2.1 AA thresholds.

ElementMeasuredAA thresholdStatus and intent
Signal orange #FF4D00 on paper #F2EFE8About 2.9:14.5:1 normal text, 3:1 large text and controlsFails both. Orange carries section numbers, accents and some link text. We are testing a darker orange that keeps the mark recognizable and clears 4.5:1.
Smallest muted grey labels on paper #F2EFE8About 3.4:14.5:1 normal textFails. These are the small uppercase labels that sit above a block of content. To be darkened, which costs us nothing but a swatch.
Type size of those same interface labels9 to 11 px, uppercase, wide letter spacingWCAG sets no minimum text sizeNot a formal failure, and still too small for extended reading. To be raised where the layout allows it.
Focus ring on anything set in signal orange #FF4D00, on paper #F2EFE8About 2.9:13:1 for a focus indicatorFails, and narrowly. Every focused control draws a ring in its own text color, which is about 14:1 where that color is the ink. Where it is the orange, and some links are, the ring inherits the orange and lands just under the line. The darker orange in the first row settles this row with it.

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

  • There is no skip link and no main landmark on any page. The same header sits at the top of all of them, so arriving on a new page means tabbing through the whole navigation again before you reach the reading content. WCAG counts that at Level A, which makes it the other serious gap on this page alongside the missing pause control.
  • The page-transition curtain ignores the reduced-motion setting. Confirmed shortfall, ours to fix.
  • The home page cog stops its idle spin under reduced motion but keeps floating, and it still turns with the scroll and tilts toward the pointer. Confirmed shortfall, ours to fix.
  • Neither the marquee nor the cog has a control you can see or reach with a keyboard to pause or stop it. Confirmed shortfall, and a control is on the list.
  • The summary panel on the quote page does not announce itself. Nothing tells a screen reader that it appeared and your focus stays where it was, so if you are not looking at the screen you get no signal that the form did anything at all. Confirmed. Use the phone or email route in 13.0, which is how a quote actually reaches us in any case.
  • The validation message on that same form is not tied to the field it is about. The field is not marked as invalid and the message is not announced, so it is visible without being spoken. Confirmed.
  • The product cards carry a quote link — an arrow into the quote form — rather than a plus button with a pop-up message, so there is no unannounced confirmation to miss. Nothing is added to a cart, because there is no cart.
  • The menu button on a narrow screen does not say whether the menu is open, and opening it does not move your focus. Confirmed, and 5.0 sets out what that costs you.
9.0
Where the problems concentrate

The home page is the worst of it. It carries the 3D cog, the marquee and most of the motion on the site, and it leans hardest on the orange accent. If one page here gives you trouble, that is the one.

The quote page is next, and for different reasons. The layout is plain, the fields are properly labelled, and the focus ring it used to switch off is back. What is left there is what happens without saying so: the summary panel arrives with no announcement, and the validation message is not tied to the field it is about. If you are working without sight, that page is still the one to skip. Email or call instead and you lose nothing, because the form never sends us anything anyway.

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.

10.0
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.

11.0
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 only loads if you opt in to it in the banner. 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.

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.

12.0
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.

13.0
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 form on the quote page only does the arithmetic in your browser and never sends anything to us, so nobody is missing out by skipping it. A written quote holds its price for 14 days.
  • An order: there is no cart and no checkout on this site for anyone. Orders are placed by email or phone, so avoiding the website costs you nothing.
  • 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.

14.0
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.

15.0
Review and revision

This statement was written on 15 Aug 2026 and describes the site as it stood that day. It was revised on 20 Aug 2026, when the consent banner and the opt-in chat widget went live: the third-party paragraph in 11.0 was corrected to name them, and the stale plus-button item came off the list in 8.0. The measurements in 8.0 still date from the 15 Aug 2026 review — the two third-party interfaces are drawn by their providers and are outside those numbers.

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.