Accessibility statement
How Puzzle Pastime is built to be genuinely easy to use — and how we check that it is.
Our commitment
Puzzle Pastime is made for older eyes, older hands, and people who may be using a screen reader, a keyboard, or an unsteady mouse. Accessibility here isn’t a checklist bolted on afterwards — it’s the reason the site looks the way it does: big print, few colours, generous spacing, and controls a single finger can manage. This page sets out exactly what we do, in real numbers, so it can be checked rather than taken on trust.
Large print, by specification
On screen, grid letters are never smaller than roughly 18pt. On printed puzzle sheets they are larger still — around 24pt — because paper doesn’t have a pinch-to-zoom. Printed grid squares are about 1.5cm across, big enough for a pen or a shaky hand. Text sits in near-black ink, not pure black, which can glare on screen, against a warm cream background — chosen for strong contrast without the harshness of white-on-black or black-on-white.
Text size, in three steps
Every page carries a text-size control in the header with three settings — Normal, Large and Extra large — one tap or click each. The choice is remembered for next time, and it’s applied before the page is drawn, so there’s no flash of small text while the page catches up.
No timers, no penalties
Nothing on Puzzle Pastime is timed, and nothing is scored against anyone else. Take a puzzle over a cup of tea, put it down and come back to it later, or leave it unfinished — none of that is recorded as a loss. That’s a design choice as much as an accessibility one, but it matters most for anyone who reads, thinks or taps more slowly than a typical website expects.
Tap-only controls, no dragging
Every puzzle can be played with single taps — nothing requires a drag, a swipe, or a precise gesture. The word search, for example, is played by tapping the first letter of a word and then its last letter, rather than dragging a line between them; dragging still works as an extra option for anyone who prefers it, but it’s never required. Every button and tap target is sized generously, so a single finger is all that’s ever needed.
Works with a keyboard
Every interactive element — puzzle cells, number pads, buttons and links — can be reached with the Tab key and activated with Enter or the spacebar, without a mouse or a touchscreen. A visible focus ring shows exactly where you are on the page at every step.
Screen readers
Grid cells, buttons and puzzle regions carry plain-English labels — a word search square announces its row, column and letter; a number pad button announces the digit it enters — and live regions announce results and hints as they appear, so a screen-reader user hears the same information a sighted player sees.
Reduced motion, no autoplay
Nothing on the site plays a video, a sound, or an animation without being asked. If your device is set to reduce motion, Puzzle Pastime respects that setting and turns off decorative movement across the whole site.
How we test
We check every new page in a real browser, not just against a checklist: we navigate it with a keyboard alone, we read it with a screen reader, and we view it with the text size turned all the way up to Extra large, to see whether anything overlaps, hides, or becomes unreadable. If a page fails any of those three checks, it doesn’t ship until it’s fixed.
Report a barrier
If you find something on Puzzle Pastime that’s hard to use — too small, too fiddly, unclear to a screen reader, or anything else — please tell us. Use the contact page; we read every message, and corrections of this kind go to the top of the pile.