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Draw My Tree
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Accessibility Statement

Effective date: October 11, 2026

Draw My Tree, operated by Prescott Bros LLC, is committed to making the Service usable by as many people as possible, including people who rely on assistive technologies.

Conformance target

We aim to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at Level AA. These guidelines, published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), are the recognized standard for making web content more accessible to people with a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive differences.

We treat Level AA as our working standard and review new features against it as part of development.

Measures we take

  • Semantic HTML landmarks and headings so screen readers can navigate pages structurally.
  • Text alternatives and labels for icons, images, and interactive controls.
  • Keyboard operability for navigation, menus, and dialogs. Dialogs move focus in on open, keep Tab inside while they are up, close on Escape, and hand focus back to whatever opened them.
  • Visible boundaries on interactive controls. Text fields, dropdowns, outline buttons, and switches are outlined at a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 against every surface they sit on, so the control, and for a switch which way it is set, can be made out without relying on a faint edge.
  • Moving between pages is announced. The app changes pages without a full reload, which a screen reader would otherwise not announce, so each navigation announces the page you have arrived at.
  • Decorative motion respects your system's reduce-motion setting: cards stop growing under the pointer and panels open without sliding, while the states that motion signalled stay signalled by color. A filter's change to the tree becomes a cross-fade with nothing moving, and Animate filter changes in Look turns it off altogether.
  • Single-key shortcuts (F, R, P, ?, /, + and -) are off unless you turn them on, so a stray key or speech input cannot set one off by accident (WCAG 2.1.4). Turn them on with Single-key shortcuts at the top of the keyboard-shortcut dialog, or under This device only in Look.
  • A text-size setting that scales the whole interface. A tree's own colors are set separately, so opening someone else's tree never changes how the app looks for you.
  • Automated accessibility linting in our build to catch common regressions before they ship.

The family tree canvas

The tree is drawn on a graphics canvas, which has no structure of its own for assistive technology to read, so every person and family junction on screen is mirrored as a real labelled button above it. In practice that means:

  • Skip to the tree, the first link on the tree page, takes you past the toolbar and the side panel to the tree.
  • Tab moves into the tree and lands on one person: the one you last used, or the one you have selected.
  • Each person is read by name and the years their card shows, such as "Ann Hale, c. 1850 – 1921", so two people of the same name sound different.
  • Arrow keys move between people from there, by where they sit on screen.
  • Alt with an arrow key (Option on a Mac) follows the family lines instead: Alt + Up to a parent, Alt + Down to their first child, and Alt + Left or Alt + Right to the sibling or partner beside them. People hidden by a filter or a collapsed branch are skipped, and when there is no one that way the tree says so.
  • Enter or Space opens the focused person's details.
  • Shift + F10 (or the Menu key) opens that person's menu, the same one a right-click gives.
  • Tab again from a selected person leaves the tree, stopping first on the + that adds a relative when their card shows one. Zoomed out to the overview the cards are too small to carry it, and the person's menu adds relatives instead.

The canvas states these keys to screen readers when you enter it, and they are also listed in the app's keyboard-shortcut dialog.

Known limitations

The interactive family tree is a visual graph. Every person is labelled with their name and years, and the keyboard follows parent, child, sibling and partner links, but the tree does not read out how two people further apart are related (a cousin, a great-grandparent), and the layout itself (who sits beside whom, how the lines run) is visual. The Family section of a person's details lists their parents, partners and children. A tree can also be exported to a format that carries the same records for assistive technologies and other tools to read directly: a complete JSON backup on any account, and GEDCOM or CSV with the Family Plan or a Keepsake.

We have verified the tree's assistive-technology behaviour programmatically but not yet with a live screen reader on every platform. If something reads wrongly in yours, please tell us at the address below.

Feedback

If you encounter an accessibility barrier, or need information from the Service in a different format, contact us at contact@drawmytree.com and describe the problem and the page or feature involved. We treat accessibility reports as a priority and will work with you to provide the information or function you need.

Changes to this statement

We may update this statement as the Service changes. When we do, we will update the effective date above.