Porchlight for Communities

Accessibility

Porchlight's primary users are people in their eighties and nineties. Accessibility isn't a checkbox for us — it's the design brief.

How the resident experience is built

One big button. The resident app is a single-action flow: tap once, talk. No menus, no passwords, no typing.
Large type and high contrast. Resident-facing screens use large, high-contrast text on calm backgrounds, sized for aging eyes on a tablet at arm's length.
Audio throughout. Every question is read aloud in a warm recorded voice (with a spoken-synthesis fallback), so reading is never required to take part.
Forgiving by default. There is no time limit. By default, once a resident has told a story and gone quiet for about eight seconds, the next question comes by itself — with a countdown on screen that any speech cancels — so nobody has to find a button. One switch (on the screen, or on the resident's page for staff) turns that off, and then the question waits until they tap Next. Any question can be skipped with one tap. Nothing a resident can tap breaks anything.
No app store. Access is a QR code or a link; it works in the tablet browser the community already has.

Staff and family surfaces

Semantic HTML, labeled form controls, and keyboard-reachable actions across the dashboard and family relay.
Status messages (like the interview's "saving your story" state) are announced politely to screen readers via live regions.
Color is never the only carrier of meaning, and we aim for WCAG 2.1 AA contrast on text.

Ongoing work & feedback

We audit our surfaces as we ship and we treat accessibility problems as bugs, not requests. If you or a resident hits something hard to use — type too small, a control a screen reader mishandles, anything — tell us at patrick@porchlight.ing or through the contact form, and we'll fix it.