Accessibility is now a release requirement, and we fixed what the new checks found

Making design education accessible to everyone includes members who use screen readers, keyboard navigation, or need higher color contrast — so accessibility is now enforced by machines, not good intentions. Every single deploy of the platform must pass automated WCAG 2.2 AA checks on our most important pages (home, login, mentorship, critique, search, jobs, community standards) plus a mathematical contrast check on our design colors. If a change breaks accessibility, it cannot ship.

The new checks immediately earned their keep. Screen reader users now get proper names on all of the social links and the language selector in our footer, and we corrected several of our design system colors that fell just short of the recommended contrast ratio -- including the pink on our primary buttons, which was at 4.3:1 against the required 4.5:1. You probably won't notice the difference, and that's the point: slightly deeper pink, measurably easier to read.