Accessibility

Most sites treat accessibility as an accommodation for some of their readers. Here it is the design, because nearly everyone who uses this site is reading dense financial documents with eyes that have changed since they were forty. The Wise Senior targets WCAG 2.1 AA as the floor and aims at AAA for text contrast and touch targets.

These are not aspirations in a document. Most of them are checked by automated tests every time the site is built, so a page that breaks one does not ship.

Type you can actually read

• •Body text is set at 18 point, and nothing anywhere on the site — not captions, not footnotes, not the legal text, not the source citations — goes below 16. Fine print is where a site hides what its reader most needs, so we do not have any.
• •An A / A+ / A++ control in the header scales the whole page. It works with your browser’s own zoom rather than against it, so if you already browse at 125% you keep that and get the increase on top.
• •A separate high-contrast switch, independent of dark mode, because needing more contrast and preferring a dark page are two different needs.
• •Light mode is the default and dark mode is opt-in — we do not follow your system setting, because many people have a system-wide dark mode they did not choose deliberately and dark backgrounds cost legibility for aging eyes.
• •Figures are set in a typeface chosen so 3, 5, 8, and 0 cannot be mistaken for one another at a glance. On a site made of numbers, that matters more than it sounds.

Controls you can hit

• •Every button, link, and form control is at least 48 by 48 pixels. The accessibility guideline says 44; we round up, because tremor and arthritis are common and a missed tap is a small humiliation nobody needs.
• •Full keyboard operation, with a visible focus outline at every stop and a logical tab order. Nothing on this site requires a mouse.
• •No information exists only in a hover state. Every tooltip and definition also opens on tap and on keyboard focus, so nothing is invisible on a phone or a tablet.
• •Menus open on click, not on hover. Navigation is shallow and labelled in words — “What Medicare Costs”, not an icon you have to interpret.

Nothing moves unless you move it

• •No carousels, no parallax, no auto-advancing anything. Motion is limited to gentle fades, and all of it stops if your system asks for reduced motion.
• •No pop-up appears because you moved your mouse toward the close button. That pattern is exactly what a scam site does, and we will not use it to sell you a newsletter.

Screen readers

• •Form inputs carry real labels, units, and error messages that say what to do rather than what went wrong.
• •Calculator results are announced when they change, so you do not have to hunt for the answer after pressing a button.
• •Screen-reader labels are written as sentences rather than keyword fragments, and the site is tested with NVDA and VoiceOver.

Plain language, and every acronym spelled out

This subject is buried in initials — IRMAA, MAGI, FRA, SEP, MSP, LTC. Every one of them is written out in full the first time it appears on a page, on every page, because you may have arrived on this page from a search rather than from the one before it. IRMAA is “the income-related monthly adjustment amount”, and we will say so again next time.

The reading level of every written surface here is measured on each build rather than asserted, and the measured figure is printed at the bottom of this page. It sits above the seventh-to-eighth-grade level this site once claimed, and we corrected the claim rather than the writing: the standard measure counts syllables per word, and the plainest available words for the things on this site — beneficiary, deductible, reconsideration, adjusted gross income — are all long ones. Writing to hit a lower score would mean not naming them, which makes a page harder to use rather than easier.

None of that is a judgement about you. The reader here is sharp, and the system is what is complicated. Cognitive accessibility is accessibility.

Everything prints

A lot of this site exists to be printed and carried to an appointment, or put on a kitchen table beside a letter. Every page prints cleanly with the site chrome removed, and the things that make a figure trustworthy travel with it onto the paper: the source, the date it was verified, the estimate-only line, and the notice that we are not a government agency. A printed page circulates on its own, so it has to carry its own context.

Where we know we fall short

Interactive charts have limited screen-reader support. Wherever a chart appears, the same figures are also available as a plain table, and that table is the version that prints. If you find a chart with no table beside it, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

Tell us what is not working

If anything on this site is hard to read, hard to reach, or impossible with the tools you use, please write to support.cosyslabs@gmail.com with “Accessibility feedback” in the subject line, or through the contact page. Tell us the page and what happened, in whatever words are easiest.

Accessibility reports are treated as bugs, not as suggestions, and they go to the front of the queue alongside corrections to our figures.