Accessibility

What we are aiming for

We are working to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2, at level AA. That is the standard UK public bodies must meet, and it is the one most people mean by “accessible”. Wendr is a private company, so no law obliges us to meet it. We are aiming for it anyway.

There is a practical reason, beyond it being the right thing. A shop worker does not choose which software their employer buys. If a screen in Wendr is unusable with a screen reader, the person affected cannot simply go elsewhere — they just cannot do part of their job. That is our problem to fix, not theirs to work around.

How accessible Wendr is right now

We believe Wendr is largely accessible, with the specific exceptions listed further down. In plain terms, as far as we have been able to check:

• every form box has a label attached to it properly, so a screen reader says what the box is for;
• every button and link has a name, including the ones that are just an icon;
• on the pages anyone can reach without signing in, text and background colours meet the required contrast, so they stay readable in poor light or with weaker eyesight. Six places did not, until 7 September 2026 — see the list further down;
• the pages say they are written in British English, so a screen reader pronounces them correctly;
• while a screen is loading, it announces “Loading” out loud rather than sitting in silence;
• if your device is set to reduce movement, nothing in Wendr animates or pulses;
• keyboard focus is visible — you can see which button or box you are on without a mouse;
• tabbing into any screen reaches a “Skip to main content” button first, so you do not have to walk past the whole menu on every page to get to the work.

What we have checked, and how

Every time we build Wendr we can run an automatic checker over all 90 pages. It uses axe, the same rules engine behind most accessibility testing tools, and tests against the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 rules at levels A and AA.

It has one large blind spot and we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise. It reads each page as it first arrives, so it never sees the panels that slide up when you tap something — the “add a product”, “import your catalogue”, “are you sure?” boxes. There are thirty-seven of those in Wendr and the checker has never opened a single one. That is not a small corner of the app; it is where most of the actual work gets done. They are checked a different way, described below, and one of them is the fourth fault in the list that follows.

As of 1 August 2026 it reports no failures on any page, with the one exception below. When we first ran it, it found two real faults, both now fixed: the loading placeholder that said nothing aloud, and a crash page that did not declare its language.

Two more faults were found by reading the code rather than by the checker, and they are worth describing because they show what the checker misses.

The first: on the screen where you load a stock list from a spreadsheet, the box that opens the file chooser had been hidden in a way that also took it out of the keyboard’s reach. Anyone working without a mouse was left with dragging the file in as the only route, which is no route at all. The checker saw nothing wrong, because a hidden box is not a fault by itself.

The second: there was no way to jump past the menu. Working by keyboard, you had to step through the wordmark, the bell, sign out and five tabs on every single screen before you reached anything you came for. On one page that is an irritation; across a working day it is the reason someone gives up. Both are now fixed — the file chooser takes keyboard focus, and tabbing into any screen offers “Skip to main content” first.

The third and worst was found later still, by a trial run in which one of us went through Wendr on a phone as a new shopkeeper would. Twenty-eight boxes across eleven screens had no name at all, so a screen reader announced them as “edit, blank” — you were being asked to type something with no way of knowing what. The turn-on-two-factor screen had two of them: the box for the six-digit code, and the button that copies your key, which is only a small picture and so said nothing but “button”. That is the most security-minded thing an owner can do in Wendr, and a blind owner could not do it. All twenty-eight now say what they are.

The fourth was reported by a shop owner on 4 August 2026, using Wendr on his own phone, and it is the plainest example of the blind spot above. He opened Stock, chose “Import catalogue”, and could not get back out: in his words, he could not see the tabs any more and it “felt like locked”. He was right on every count. The cross that closes the panel was drawn about twenty pixels wide — narrower than a fingertip, and on a phone it was the only way out you could see. The panel was sized against the height of the screen with the browser’s own toolbar hidden, so with the toolbar showing it was taller than the room it had and its top edge — the row holding that cross — could be pushed off the screen altogether. And the phone’s own Back button, which is what anybody actually reaches for, left the page instead of closing the panel, throwing away everything he had ticked. In the Android app it closed Wendr outright.

All three are fixed, everywhere, not just on that one screen: every close button in Wendr is now a full finger’s width, every panel is sized so it cannot outgrow the screen it is on, the page behind stops scrolling while a panel is open, and Back closes the panel you are looking at rather than leaving the page. There are now checks that refuse any future panel that misses one of those.

The reason it went unnoticed for so long is worth stating plainly, because it says something about the limits of this kind of checking. A heading sitting above a box is not a label — a screen reader treats the two as separate things and never joins them up. The grey writing inside a box is not a label either; it vanishes the moment you type. Both look exactly like labels on screen, so every one of those screens looked finished.

We also check the checker. Before trusting a clean result we deliberately planted three faults — a picture with no description, a button with no name, and a box with no label — and confirmed it caught all three. A checking tool that reports “all clear” because it is broken looks exactly like one that reports “all clear” because everything is fine.

That exercise still missed something, and on 7 September 2026 we found out what. The three faults we planted were all faults of the kind the checker can see. Not one of them was a colour — and the colour rule had never run. It reads a page without ever drawing it, and the colour test needs the page drawn to know what is behind the words, so it stopped with an error on the first line of text on every page and we recorded the silence as a pass. Six pieces of writing on the public site were fainter than the rules allow. The worst was the paragraph in the footer giving our registered company name, number and address — the one we are obliged by law to publish — which was the least readable text on the whole website. All six are fixed, the colour is now checked a different way that needs no drawing, and the checker now prints the number of things it could not decide rather than leaving them out of the report. If you are wondering how something so obvious lasted so long: it was never reported, and nobody re-reads a clean report.

Since the twenty-eight, there is also a check that runs every time we change Wendr and refuses the change if any box you type in, or anything you press that is only a picture, has been left without a name. It reads every screen rather than opening it, so unlike the checker above it reaches the panels and steps you only get to by tapping. We proved it by putting each of those faults back one at a time and watching it object.

What we know is not right yet

This one is real, we know about it, and it is not fixed:

• The emergency holding page has no language set. If Wendr fails before it has finished starting up, the bare page shown in that moment comes from the framework we build on, not from us, and we cannot set its language. Our own crash page — the one you would actually end up looking at — is correct.

What we have not tested

This is the honest limit of what we can claim, and it is the most important section on this page.

• No disabled person has tested Wendr. Everything above was checked by us and by software. That is not the same thing, and we are not going to pretend it is.
• No real screen reader has been used on it. Not VoiceOver, not TalkBack, not JAWS or NVDA. The automatic checker reads the page the way the rules say a screen reader should behave, which is not the same as how one actually does.
• Automatic checking only finds some faults. It reliably catches missing labels and missing names. It cannot tell you whether a screen makes sense when read aloud from top to bottom, whether a heading is honest, or whether an error message tells you what to do next. Those need a person.
• The automatic checker only sees a screen as it first opens. It cannot tap. So a panel that slides up from the bottom, a step you only reach after answering something, or a box that only exists while you are clocked in, is invisible to it. That is exactly where the twenty-eight unnamed boxes were hiding — the first of them was three taps into a panel on the end-of-shift report — and it is why they were found by a person going through the app rather than by the checker. Treat a clean automatic result as covering the front of each screen, not all of it.
• Screens are checked before your shop’s data is on them. The check looks at each page as it is built, not after it has filled with your staff, rotas and payslips. A table of real people is not covered by anything above.
• The Android app has not been checked separately. It shows the same screens, so most of this should carry across, but “should” is not “has been checked”.

Things that are hard to get right, and what we do about them

Some parts of Wendr are difficult to make fully accessible and we would rather say so than quietly hope nobody notices:

• Dragging a file onto the screen is how you can load a stock list from a spreadsheet. Dragging needs a mouse and a steady hand, so there is also a plain “choose your CSV” button on the same box that opens the normal file chooser, and it works from the keyboard. Dragging is the shortcut, never the only way.
• Scanning a barcode with the camera cannot be made to work for a blind user. Every product can also be found and entered by typing.
• Payslips and the inspection pack are PDFs. PDFs are often awkward with screen readers. If you need any of these in a different format, ask us and we will send it another way.

If something stops you using Wendr

Please tell us. Email hello@wendr.co.uk, say what you were trying to do and what got in the way, and mention what you use — a screen reader, keyboard only, large text, and so on. You do not need to know the technical name for the problem.

We will reply within five working days. If a fault is blocking you from doing your job, we treat it as urgent, the same as any other fault that stops the app working. If we cannot fix it quickly we will tell you honestly how long it will take, and find you another way to get the task done in the meantime.

If you need something from Wendr in a different format — larger print, a plain text file, a spreadsheet instead of a PDF — just ask.

Making a formal complaint

If you are not happy with how we have responded, you can complain to us formally using the complaint form, and we will handle it under our normal complaints process.

In England, Scotland and Wales, the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) can advise you on your rights under the Equality Act 2010. In Northern Ireland, contact the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland (ECNI).

This statement was prepared on 1 August 2026, based on an automatic check of every page carried out on that date, and last revised on 4 August 2026 to record a fault reported by a shop owner, the three fixes it led to, and the blind spot in that automatic check which had let it through. Wendr is provided by Premak Services Ltd, a company registered in England & Wales (company number 16865244), registered office 61 Bridge Street, Kington, HR5 3DJ.