Accessibility
Written plainly, for the person using the app and the family they invite. Last updated August 2026.
Guardian Sarah is built for people in their seventies, eighties and nineties — which means accessibility is not a checklist for us, it is the product working at all. Eyes, ears and hands change with age. The app has to keep up, and where it does not yet, this page says so.
What we aim for
We work toward the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Level AA, across the app the older adult uses, the app their family uses, and this website. For text contrast we hold ourselves to the stricter AAA bar of 7:1 wherever we can achieve it, because reduced contrast sensitivity is near-universal past 75 — a standard we chose, not one anyone required of us.
- Large text everywhere. Nothing in the apps is set below 15 pixels, and the text grows when you raise your phone's text size.
- Big touch targets. Buttons are sized for hands that shake a little, well beyond the platform minimums.
- Screen readers. Controls carry names, roles and states for VoiceOver and TalkBack, screens announce themselves when they change, and errors are spoken, not just shown.
- Voice input. The words on a button are the words you can say to press it.
- Keyboard and switch access on the web. Real buttons, visible focus, no hover-only controls, a skip link on every page of this site.
- No disappearing errors. When something fails, the message stays until you dismiss it.
These rules are enforced by automated checks that run before every release, so a fix cannot quietly come undone. When we find something wrong, we record it and track it until it ships — not just fix it and forget.
What is not right yet
We would rather tell you than have you discover it:
- No transcripts or captions yet. Voice notes from family, and the conversation with Sarah herself, are audio without a text version. For someone hard of hearing this is our biggest gap, and it is the one we are working on. Sarah speaks slowly and clearly, and you can raise her volume, but that is not a substitute.
- The very largest text sizes. The apps honour your phone's text-size setting up to a generous ceiling, but not the absolute maximum some phones offer. If the largest sizes matter to you, tell us — it moves the work up the list.
- Real-device testing is still under way. Our recent fixes were made against the code; a full pass with VoiceOver, TalkBack and people who rely on them is scheduled and not yet finished.
- Light appearance only. The family app uses one warm, high-contrast light palette and does not offer a dark appearance.
No badge, on purpose
We do not claim conformance with WCAG or any other accessibility standard. A conformance claim is a promise that independent testing has verified every page and every screen, and ours has not finished. Until it has, printing a badge would be marketing, not truth. What we can honestly say is on this page: the standard we aim for, what meets it, and what does not yet.
Tell us when something is hard to use
If any part of Guardian Sarah — either app, or this website — is difficult with a screen reader, large text, voice input, a keyboard, or in any other way, we want to know. Email support@guardiansarah.com and describe what you were trying to do. A person answers, usually within one business day, and accessibility problems go to the top of the pile — for this product they are not edge cases.