Who we are thinking about when we design these products
HeartFirst products are designed for general use — but general use includes a wider range of situations than most digital products acknowledge. When we make design and content decisions, we are thinking about people in all of these circumstances.
People dealing with health anxiety or acute fear
Someone who has just received an abnormal result, been told they may have inherited a serious risk, or spent hours in an anxious online search spiral. Cognitive load is high. Attention is fragmented. The design should be calm, clear, and never exploitative of that state.
People processing a recent diagnosis or clinical event
A previous heart attack, stroke, or TIA. A confirmed Lp(a) result. A parent who died of heart disease at 52. These are not abstract scenarios for our users — they are the reason someone buys this product. Content and design should acknowledge that weight without amplifying it.
People navigating contradictory or alarming online information
The internet is full of cardiovascular misinformation — scare-mongering, false claims, unqualified opinions presented as clinical fact, and content designed to provoke anxiety rather than resolve it. Someone arriving at HeartFirst may have already been through that. We write and design with the goal of being a calming counterweight, not another source of noise.
Older adults and people less comfortable with digital products
Cardiovascular risk increases with age. Many of our users are not digital natives. Products and websites should be usable at a comfortable reading pace, without requiring technical confidence, and should work well at larger text sizes.
People with visual impairment, low vision, or colour blindness
Our design uses strong contrast ratios in both light and dark modes, avoids conveying critical information through colour alone, and is structured to work with screen readers. People should not need full vision to understand whether something is urgent or important.
People using assistive technologies
Screen readers, switch access, voice control, keyboard-only navigation, and browser zoom tools. Our HTML is written semantically, with appropriate ARIA labels, logical heading structure, and meaningful link text. No feature of our products should require a mouse.
People buying on behalf of someone else
A partner who is managing a loved one’s heart health. A child helping an elderly parent navigate a diagnosis. An adult sibling coordinating care after a family member’s cardiac event. The product should be usable in proxy as well as in person.
What we have built into our products and websites
Dark and light mode
All pages and products respect your system theme preference automatically, and offer a manual toggle. Dark mode reduces eye strain for people with light sensitivity, migraine, or those reading at night under stress. Both modes are designed and tested to meet WCAG AA contrast expectations.
Readable typography at scale
We use Source Serif 4 — an optically-sized typeface designed for high legibility at a range of sizes. Body text is set at 17px minimum. Our pages are designed to scale cleanly with browser zoom to 200% without horizontal scrolling or content loss.
Reduced motion support
All animations and transitions respect the prefers-reduced-motion media query. Scroll animations, hover effects, and decorative transitions are disabled automatically for users who have set this preference — including people with vestibular disorders, epilepsy, or motion sensitivity.
Semantic HTML and logical structure
All pages use semantic HTML5 elements — landmarks, headings in correct hierarchy, labelled form fields, and descriptive link text. Screen readers can navigate by heading, section, or form field without requiring visual context.
Keyboard and focus management
Interactive elements should be reachable and operable by keyboard alone. We test for this and treat failures as accessibility bugs.
Colour not used as the only signal
Where colour is used to convey meaning — for example, distinguishing what a test does versus does not show — it is always supplemented by text labels, icons, or structural separation. Critical information is never conveyed by colour alone.
PDF and print optimisation
Digital products include print CSS that produces clean, high-contrast PDF output suitable for printing and bringing to appointments. This matters for people who prefer paper, for use in clinical settings, and for anyone whose device screen is difficult to use in a medical environment.
Understandable language
All product content and website copy is written to be understood without medical training. Clinical terms are defined where they appear. A useful clinical glossary is included in every product. We write for comprehension, not credentialling.
Technical standard and conformance
Honesty note: We are a small team. We build carefully and test across common assistive technologies, but we have not been formally audited. We do not claim full WCAG compliance: we claim WCAG 2.2 AA as our target standard and commitment. If you find something that does not work for you, please tell us. We treat accessibility reports as priority issues.
Known limitations we are working on
Complex PDF document accessibility
Our downloadable product PDFs are generated from structured HTML with semantic markup, but have not been tested with all PDF screen reader configurations. Tagged PDF output is on our roadmap. If you need an accessible version, contact us and we will work with you directly.
Dynamic accordion announcements
FAQ accordions on some pages may not announce state changes (expanded/collapsed) consistently across all screen reader and browser combinations. We are testing and updating these progressively.
Third-party checkout
Our checkout may be powered by third-party payment providers such as Stripe and, where available, PayPal. We cannot directly control every aspect of third-party checkout accessibility, but we will escalate reported issues where appropriate and help users complete a purchase through an alternative route where feasible.
If something doesn’t work for you
If you encounter an accessibility barrier — on our website, in a product, or during the purchase process — please contact us. We respond to accessibility reports within 2 business days and treat them as priority issues.
We can also provide:
- Alternative formats of product content where technically feasible
- Assistance completing a purchase if the checkout is not accessible to you
- A larger-text or simplified version of specific content on request
- Practical support where assistive-technology issues affect access
We will never ask you to justify an access need. If something is not working for you, tell us what you need. We will do what we can. If we cannot meet the need directly, we will tell you honestly and refund you if the product cannot be made accessible to you.
Why this matters to us specifically
Most digital health products treat accessibility as a compliance requirement. We treat it as a design principle — because our users are sometimes in one of the most difficult and frightening moments of their adult lives.
A person who has just discovered they have an elevated Lp(a) and cannot find reliable, clear information about what it means is dealing with fear. A person who has lost a parent to a sudden heart attack at 58 and is now trying to understand their own risk is dealing with grief as well as fear. A person reading their first ever blood test result without knowing what the numbers mean is dealing with confusion that anxiety makes worse.
We cannot remove those feelings. We can design products that do not make them worse — that are clear rather than alarming, structured rather than overwhelming, and usable by people who are not at their best. That is the accessibility commitment underneath the technical one.
Enforcement and escalation
If you are not satisfied with our response to an accessibility concern, you have the right to escalate. In the UK, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Equality Act 2010. In the EU, equivalent bodies exist in each member state. We will always cooperate with any formal accessibility investigation.
For public sector bodies in the UK, the Web Accessibility Regulations 2018 apply. HeartFirst is a private commercial entity and is not subject to those regulations — but we use the same WCAG 2.1 AA standard as our design target regardless.