Frightening, and still usable

This was the most serious problem we had. Earlier versions of the scare flashed roughly eight times a second in saturated red, which is both a WCAG failure and a genuine hazard for people with photosensitive epilepsy.

It now flashes once. One frame of white, decaying into the image. Nothing on this site flashes repeatedly, anywhere, at any intensity. It is also better cinema than a strobe was, so nothing was lost in fixing it.

If you would rather have no flash at all, switch on reduced motion below, or turn Scares off entirely at the top of any page.

If your device asks for reduced motion, we obey it without being asked: no shaking, no strobe, no chromatic aberration, no doubled scare at level five, and the drifting fog and film grain stop. The scare still happens. It simply arrives instead of lunging.

If your device does not ask, but you would like the same thing, the switch below does it and remembers.

Everything that can be clicked can be reached and operated with a keyboard. Focus is always visible — a solid outline, offset from the element, at a contrast we have actually measured rather than assumed.

Esc stops any scare sequence at any point, including one already running. Every page has a skip link to the main content as its first stop.

All text meets WCAG AA contrast against its background, and the borders of buttons and inputs meet the 3:1 required to identify a control. This is a very dark site, which makes faint grey text tempting; we removed all of it.

Text can be resized to 200% without loss, and the layout reflows to a single column on narrow screens without a horizontal scrollbar.

Wrong Picture has a countdown, because the pressure is the game. It can be switched off before you start: the clock disappears, running out of time stops being possible, and the round can be skipped at any moment.

The Wait has no time limit on you at all. It waits as long as you leave it open, and stops the instant you close the tab or press the button.

Pages use real landmarks and a heading order with no gaps. Decorative scenery is hidden from assistive technology; anything meaningful is labelled. Status changes — a scare beginning, a round solved, a form submitted — are announced politely rather than shouted.

Wrong Picture is the honest exception. It is a game about seeing a detail, and no amount of markup makes a visual puzzle solvable without sight. Rather than pretend otherwise, every round has a Skip this picture control, so nobody is stuck inside something they cannot finish.

Nothing plays on its own. The audio device is not opened at all until you press something, so a page left in a background tab stays silent forever. Sound has its own switch, separate from scares, and the entire site works with it off.

No information is carried by sound alone: whatever you would hear, you can also see.

The scare overlay takes over the whole screen for about a second. While it is up, the page behind it is still technically reachable by a screen reader, which is untidy. It is brief, it is escapable, and it is on the list.

The 3D scenes are decorative and hidden from assistive technology, so nothing is lost by not seeing them — but their fallback is a hand-built CSS version rather than a description, and a description would be better.

If something here is unusable, we would genuinely rather know. The complaints procedure on the Terms of Scare is a joke. This one is not: accessibility reports are read and acted on, and they are the only correspondence The Management treats as urgent.