Accessibility

Amplify Barbershop is a place of public accommodation, and booking a haircut online should work for everyone. This site is built to WCAG 2.2 Level AA.

The U.S. Department of Justice formally adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA in 2024 as the standard for state and local government websites, and has long treated it as the measure of accessibility for businesses open to the public. WCAG 2.2 is a superset of 2.1, so building to it meets that standard and a little more.

What that means here

Specifically, and checkably:

• Keyboard only. Every part of booking — choosing a service, a barber, a time, entering your details, and paying — works without a mouse. The time grid also responds to the arrow keys, and to Home and End, because tabbing through several hundred times is no fun. Every control stays reachable by Tab as well.
• Focus is always visible and never hidden behind the header when you tab down the page.
• A skip link is the first thing you reach, so you can jump past the header straight to the content.
• Screen readers. Each step of booking announces itself, including which step you are on and how many there are — the count is read from the wizard rather than written here, because it is three steps when the shop has one barber and four when it has several. Errors are announced and move your focus to them, rather than failing silently. Opening hours are a real table, so the day and its hours stay connected, and the table can be scrolled with the keyboard and not only with a mouse.
• Contrast. Every text colour on this site was measured against its background, not estimated, and the measurements are re-checked automatically so this page cannot drift away from them. The lowest ratio in use is 6.61:1, against a 4.5:1 requirement, so nothing here depends on being large text in order to pass.
• Colour is never the only signal. A selected time also gains a marker; a field with an error also gains a thicker border. Turn colour off and the page still tells you what is happening.
• Motion. Movement is deliberately rationed: one moving element per section, and the fastest thing on the site completes a cycle roughly once every four seconds — an order of magnitude below the rate that can trigger seizures. Nothing flashes and nothing flickers.
• You can stop it. There is a Pause motion button at the foot of every page. It stops the turning pattern in the middle of the home page and the drifting one behind this footer, and it remembers your choice, so you do not have to press it again on the next page or the next visit. That is separate from the device setting below on purpose: not everyone can change a system preference on the machine they happen to be using.
• If your device is set to reduce motion, everything stops. Not hidden, not mid-transition — each animation lands in its finished state, so the page is complete and readable and simply still. Buttons and links still respond to hover and to keyboard focus; they just do it instantly. There is an automated check that fails our build if anyone adds an animation without also adding it to that list.
• Touch targets. Every control is at least 24 by 24 pixels, which is what the standard requires. The ones you use most — the buttons for choosing a service, a barber and a time, and every button that confirms or cancels — are at least 44.
• Images. There are none. Every shape you can see here is drawn by the page itself, not loaded as a picture, which means there is nothing for a screen reader to describe and nothing that turns into an empty box if it fails to load. It also means no text on this site is baked into an image: every word is real text you can select, enlarge, restyle or have read aloud.
• No CAPTCHA. You will never be asked to identify a traffic light to book a haircut. Spam is handled invisibly instead.
• No re-typing. Your name and email are asked for once. If you go back a step, they are still there.

What is not done yet

Being straight about the gaps is part of the point of a page like this.

• No independent audit has been carried out. Everything above was tested by the people who built the site — by keyboard, with automated checks, and by measuring every colour pair. That is not the same as an expert review, and we have not had one.
• Screen reader testing has not covered every combination. If something reads badly on your setup, we want to know which one.
• This page has been wrong before. An earlier version claimed a 44-pixel minimum on every control and a 6.8:1 contrast floor. Neither was true: several small text buttons were about 16 pixels tall, and the real floor is 6.27:1. Both have been fixed in the site and corrected here, and there are now automated checks that fail if the numbers on this page stop matching the code. We would rather say that than quietly edit it.
• And it was incomplete until recently. The turning element on the home page ran continuously with no way for a visitor to stop it, which the standard asks for and this page did not mention. The button in the footer is that mechanism. The contrast figure above also moved from 6.27:1 to 6.61:1 when the shop changed to Berkeley’s blue and gold — every colour pair was re-measured, not estimated, and the build now fails if this number and the palette disagree. For a few hours the home page also carried a large illustration; it has been taken back out, which is why the paragraph about images says there are none.
• The payment page is not ours. Paying online sends you to Stripe, whose page we do not control and cannot fix. If you have trouble there, you can always choose to pay at the shop instead — that option is offered for exactly this kind of reason, not only as a convenience.

If something does not work

Tell us and we will fix it, and book your appointment for you in the meantime. Call (510) 374-8635. It helps to know what you were trying to do and what you were using, but do not let that stop you getting in touch.

You can always book by phone. The website is one way to reach us, not the only one.