Accessibility

WCAG 2.2, Level AA. That is the level referenced by the European Accessibility Act, by EN 301 549, by Section 508 in the United States, and by the courts that hear web accessibility claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Partially conformant. Most of the site meets Level AA. One feature does not, and it is named below rather than buried.

Across 70 page types there are now no automatically detectable WCAG 2.2 A or AA failures. Automated testing catches roughly a third of the standard, so that is a floor, not a pass mark. The rest of this page is about the other two thirds.

• A skip link on every page, so a screen reader or keyboard reader can jump straight past the navigation to the content.
• One <main> landmark per page, one <h1>, and a heading order you can navigate by heading shortcuts.
• Every interactive control reachable by Tab, with a visible focus ring that is not removed anywhere.
• Tap targets that meet WCAG 2.2 success criterion 2.5.8: 24 CSS pixels square, or spaced far enough apart that a 24-pixel touch cannot hit two of them. We measured every link and button on 18 page types at a 375-pixel phone width to check this.
• Motion respects your system reduce motionsetting: smooth scrolling, the loading animation and the globe’s idle rotation all stop.
• Satellite records, statistics, sources and methodology are plain HTML text and tables. Nothing important is inside an image.
• Light and dark themes, plus a text density and page width control under Preferences.

The 3D globe is not accessible. The satellite playground draws roughly sixteen thousand moving objects into a WebGL canvas. A canvas is a single opaque element to a screen reader: there is no meaningful way to expose sixteen thousand orbiting points through it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The same applies to the embeddable globe on /widgets.

Everything the globe shows is available as text, and those routes are the accessible equivalent under WCAG 2.2 conformance requirement 1:

• Search and the catalog for any individual object, with its full orbital record.
• Statistics for the counts and distributions the globe visualises.
• Today in orbit for what changed, in prose.
• The public API for the raw numbers, if a screen reader is not the tool you want for this.

Two further gaps we know about and have not fixed: some decorative charts convey their shape by colour alone, and a handful of colour pairs sit on gradients or images where contrast could not be computed automatically and has not been measured by hand.

Automated scan of 70 page types with axe-core 4.10 against WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 Level A and AA rules, at 1280×900, in Chromium, on 9 August 2026. Landmark, heading and keyboard structure checked per page, and every link and button measured for target size at a 375-pixel phone width. Self-assessed: no third party has audited this site, and we would rather say so than imply a certification we do not have.

Current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, with NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver. The site should degrade to readable text without JavaScript, but interactive features, including search and the globe, need it.

If any part of this site stops you doing something, email hello@orbitalwiki.com or use the contact form. Tell us the page and what you were trying to do. We aim to reply within 5 working days.

If you need something from the catalog that you cannot get to, say so in the same message and we will send you the data directly rather than make you wait for a fix.

In the European Union, accessibility complaints about online services can be escalated to the national enforcement body in your member state under the European Accessibility Act. In the United Kingdom, to the Equality Advisory and Support Service. We would much rather hear from you first.