Accessibilité

The African Food Network is built to be read by everybody, including people using a screen reader, a keyboard alone, a magnifier, or a phone in bright sunlight. This page says what we have built, gives the numbers where we have measured them, and lists what we know is still wrong.

Built to WCAG 2.2 at AA and measured against it, not independently audited. That is the honest form of this sentence and we would rather write it than a badge. Nobody outside the team has tested this site, so a claim of conformance would be a claim nobody has checked.

Scope. This statement covers the African Food Network website. A mobile app is being built and is not covered here; it will get its own statement before it ships, and it is being held to a 44 by 44 pixel minimum touch target by a check with no way to opt out of it.

Everything measured below was measured on 6 September 2026, from the colour definitions in the site’s own stylesheet, and is re-derived by an automated check that fails the build if a colour changes and the number here does not.

Every text colour is defined once, in one file. Body text measures 8.89:1 against the page and 9.74:1 against a white card, where the requirement is 4.5:1. The quietest line in the footer measures 5.36:1.

The focus ring is a darker gold than the brand gold. The brand gold measures 2.71:1 against the page and the requirement for a control’s outline is 3:1, so it is not allowed to be the ring; the darker gold we use instead measures 5.82:1. Brand colour does not get to override a legibility floor.

Colour is never the only way something is said. The week-on-week movement on our recipe chart is an arrow that points up or down, a number, and a written label — “Up 4 places” — as well as a colour, so it reads the same to somebody who cannot separate the green from the terracotta and to somebody using a screen reader.

• A Skip to content link is the first thing a keyboard reaches on every page.
• Every interactive control is a real button, link, or form field, so it behaves the way your software expects it to. There are no clickable divs pretending to be buttons.
• The recipe carousels scroll rather than transform, so a keyboard and a screen reader can both find a real position in them and move through them.
• Expanding sections, including this site's Help Centre, use the browser's own disclosure element rather than a JavaScript imitation, so they are announced correctly without any ARIA of ours.
• Decorative images carry an empty alt attribute so they are skipped. Photographs that carry meaning are described.
• Where a rail repeats cards to loop smoothly, the copies are hidden from screen readers and kept out of the tab order, so each recipe is announced once.

If your device is set to reduce motion, the site respects it. The recipe cards that turn over cross-fade instead of rotating, the carousels stop drifting on their own, and transitions are removed rather than shortened. That setting is honoured in 59 places across our stylesheets and components.

The site also has a light and a dark theme, and a system option that follows your device.

Recipes are written to be cooked from, not only read. Every recipe has a print view that drops the navigation and the adverts, a shopping list built from its ingredients, and a cook mode that keeps the screen awake and the steps large.

Dietary tags describe the recipe as written. Where a tag could mislead — a dairy-free dish whose method mentions butter, for instance — the recipe says so on the page rather than leaving you to find it in the ingredients. Please still read the ingredients yourself if you are cooking for an allergy.

This list is honest rather than short. If you hit something that is not on it, that is worth telling us about.

• No independent audit. Everything here was measured by the team that built it. An audit by disabled testers is the single most useful thing this list is waiting on.
• Most of this site has been checked by reasoning about the markup rather than by driving it with a screen reader. Reading the code tells you what should be announced; it does not tell you what a person actually hears. Treat every claim on this page as verified against the code and not yet against the experience.
• Third-party content we do not control. The festival films are YouTube embeds, and their player, captions and controls are Google's rather than ours. Our advertising and analytics are also third-party. Where those fall short we can remove them, but we cannot fix them.
• Some standalone links — the “View all” and “See all” links that end a section — are short and set in small type. They carry an enlarged touch area, but we have not verified every one of them against the 24 by 24 pixel target-size rule.
• Inherited photographs. Around six hundred recipe images came across from our previous site. Their alt text was written for that site and some of it is thin. We are rewriting it, recipe by recipe.
• No captions of our own, because we host no video of our own yet. When we do, it will carry captions and a transcript from the first upload, not after.
• Long ingredient tables on a small screen scroll sideways inside their own box. That is better than the page scrolling sideways, but it is not as good as a layout that reflows.
• We publish no PDFs today. If we ever do, a PDF without tagged text is not an accessible document, and it will not go up without a readable equivalent beside it.

If any part of this site stops you doing something, please write to info@afrifoodnetwork.com. Tell us what you were trying to do, what got in the way, and what you were using — a browser and a device name is usually enough.

That address is read by the AFN editorial desk in Abuja, and accessibility reports are passed to the team that builds the site. A person will reply within five working days. That is a promise about the reply, not about the fix: some of these take an afternoon and some take a rebuild, and we would rather tell you which one it is than go quiet.

You can also write to us at African Food Network, Owena House, 76 Ralph Shodeinde Street, Central Business District, FCT Abuja, Nigeria.

Related: Help Centre · Contact · Editorial standards

Last reviewed 6 September 2026. This statement is reviewed whenever the site changes materially, and at least twice a year.