For parents & carers

Accessibility

Last updated:

Animal Friends is a free picture-book encyclopedia for curious kids. It should also work for children and grown-ups with a wide range of needs — whether someone is exploring alone or reading together on a shared device.

Accessibility is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time checklist. If something gets in the way, we treat that as a bug we want to fix.

At a glance

  • Keyboard navigation with visible focus
  • Descriptive text for images
  • Large touch targets for small hands
  • Respects “reduce motion” settings
  • Meaning never relies on colour alone
  • Report barriers to Throwing Eights

1. Our commitment

Animal Friends is operated by Throwing Eights Pty Ltd (ABN 53 670 017 802), Melbourne, Australia. We design the site so that more children and adults can use it with confidence — including people who use keyboards, screen readers, magnification, or reduced-motion settings.

The site is available at animal-friends.club.

2. Who this is for

The encyclopedia is aimed at children (approximately ages 2–10) and the parents, carers, grandparents, and educators who use it with them. Accessibility work covers both independent use by a child and shared parent–child use on phones, tablets, and larger screens.

3. Keyboard and focus

  • Core journeys work with a keyboard alone
  • Interactive controls show a clear focus outline when focused
  • A “Skip to content” link jumps past the site chrome to the main page content
  • Important actions are available as real buttons and links — not hover-only controls

4. Screen readers and alternatives

  • Pages use semantic HTML landmarks and headings where practical
  • Images include descriptive alternative text
  • Controls that need a name have accessible labels (for example favourites and theme toggle)
  • Decorative graphics are hidden from assistive technology where appropriate

Captions and transcripts for video, and transcripts or clear labels for audio, are part of our content standards when those media types are published. Today the encyclopedia is primarily text and still images.

5. Vision, colour, and contrast

  • Text is designed to scale with browser and system font settings
  • We aim for strong contrast between text and backgrounds in both light and dark themes
  • Meaning is never carried by colour alone — status and categories also use text or other cues
  • A light/dark theme control is available; the preference is stored on the device

6. Motion and sound

  • Motion is kept gentle
  • The site respects the operating system “reduce motion” / prefers-reduced-motion preference
  • We avoid rapid flashing content
  • We avoid unexpected loud audio; sound is not required to use the encyclopedia

7. Touch and motor

  • Primary controls use large touch targets suited to small hands
  • Interactions do not depend on hover alone
  • Layouts adapt across phone, tablet, and desktop widths

8. Reading and language

  • Content is written in plain, child-friendly language
  • Pages declare English as the document language
  • Line lengths on long-form pages are constrained for comfortable reading

Animal Friends is not a medical, diagnostic, or therapy tool. Accessibility here means usable design for learning about animals — not a claim that every individual need is already met.

9. Standards we aim for

We design and build toward the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA as a practical target. That is a goal we work toward, not a formal certification or guarantee that every page has passed an independent audit.

We also follow our own product requirements for children’s products: semantic structure, keyboard use, visible focus, alternative text, reduced motion, high contrast, scalable text, and large touch targets.

10. Known limits

Some areas may still be harder than we want them to be. Examples include:

  • Complex photographic pages where visual storytelling is central
  • Third-party search UI styling that we customise but do not fully own
  • External websites linked from Sources and attribution (grown-up areas) — we do not control those sites

We improve these as we learn about real barriers from families and testers.

11. Report a barrier

Found something that blocks you or a child in your care? Please tell us. Include the page address, what you were trying to do, the device or browser if you know it, and any assistive technology you use. We will look into it promptly.

Related: our Privacy Policy explains how little information Animal Friends collects.

12. Changes to this page

We may update this statement when the product or our practices change. When we do, we revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page.