Artisans Paradise

Artisans Paradise should work for you whether you use a screen reader, a keyboard and no mouse, voice control, a magnifier, captions, or none of those. This page is an honest account of how close we are, what we know is broken, and how to tell us when we have got in your way.

Last reviewed: 17 September 2026.

The standard we are aiming for

We are building toward WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the technical standard most commonly used to judge whether a website is accessible.

We are not there yet, and we are not going to tell you otherwise. In September 2026 we had the whole site measured against that standard, and the list below is what came back. We are working through it.

What falls short today

These are the ones we know about. They are real, they are ours, and naming them is not an excuse — it is so you know what you are walking into before you hit it.

Live streams have no captions. This is the big one. Our sellers talk while they work and while they run an auction, and none of that is captioned in real time. If you are deaf or hard of hearing, a live show is currently not usable as a live show. We do not have live captioning in place and we are not going to pretend a date for it that we cannot keep.
Recorded video is not captioned either. Stream replays and the “watch it made” maker process videos ship without captions, subtitles, or a text description of what is shown on screen.
Parts of a live auction are not announced. If you use a screen reader, the bid price, the clock and the result of a lot do not reliably reach you as they change. You can press the bid button; you cannot always hear what happened next.
Some text and some controls are too low in contrast. Input outlines, a number of small labels and hints, and the star ratings do not have enough contrast against the paper background for everyone to see them comfortably.
A few seller tools need a mouse. Dragging listings and photos into the order you want — including choosing which photo buyers see first — has no keyboard equivalent yet.
Charts have no text version. The graphs in the seller dashboard are drawn as pictures with no equivalent table behind them.

There are smaller items too. The full working list, with what is fixed and what is still open, is kept in the repository as a dated remediation log so that it is a record rather than a press release.

Buying without a live stream

Because live video is the piece we are furthest behind on, it matters that it is not the only way to buy. It is not. Every maker has a storefront, and pieces can be browsed and bought outright from Browse, from Makers, and from any item page, with no video involved at any step. If a live show is not usable for you, that path is, and we intend to keep it that way.

Some of this is not ours to fix alone

Parts of the site are built on other companies’ components — the video player, the payment fields at checkout. We choose those vendors and we are responsible for what we ship, but where the fix belongs to them we chase them for it rather than quietly blaming the plumbing.

Tell us what got in your way

If something on Artisans Paradise blocked you, please tell us — even if it is on the list above, because knowing it hit a real person changes what we fix first. Use the support form and say what page you were on, what you were trying to do, and what happened instead. If you use assistive technology, telling us which one and which browser helps us reproduce it faster.

We do not have a dedicated accessibility address yet. That is a gap we intend to close, and it will be published here when it exists. Until then the support form reaches the same people.

If the form itself is what is broken for you, any of the contact routes on our support page will reach us, and we will take the report however it is easiest for you to send it.

How we are working on it

We keep a dated log of every accessibility issue we find: what it is, where it is, when we found it, and when it was fixed. It is updated as work lands rather than written up afterwards. Testing so far has been a mix of automated tools and hands-on keyboard and screen-reader passes; we know that automated tools catch only a fraction of what actually matters, and that testing with disabled people is the part that finds the rest.