What these three words mean here
They are not decoration and they are not interchangeable, so this page uses them in exactly one sense each.
- Standard
- A published specification or defined practice we intentionally build to, and verify against.
- Certification
- A credential issued to us, or independently verified, by an external organisation.
- Award
- Recognition granted to us by an external organisation.
A standard we hold ourselves to is a claim we make and check. It is not the same as somebody else's approval, and we do not present it as one.
Today we hold no certification and have received no award, and this page says so rather than implying otherwise. Should we ever obtain one, it will appear here as its own entry, naming the organisation that issued it and the date we last verified it - never before, and never as a badge with nothing behind it.
Standards we build to
Standard
WCAG 2.2 Level AA
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, Level AA, is the conformance target for our public website and public customer flows. We check it on every change: an automated accessibility scan runs against the public pages in a real browser, and the parts a scanner cannot decide - keyboard order, focus visibility, the mobile menu, contrast over layered backgrounds - are asserted by hand in that same browser.
This is our own conformance claim, not a third-party certification. Nobody reviews or approves this site on W3C's behalf, and W3C does not certify websites. The Accessibility Statement is the detailed owner: what the claim covers, what it does not, how we test, and how to tell us about a barrier.
Specification published by the World Wide Web Consortium. Conformance claimed and verified by Elysium.
Standard
HTML Living Standard
Every public page on this site is checked for conformance to the HTML specification before the change that touched it can be released - as the page is actually served, with the shared header, footer and other assembled parts in place, rather than as it was written. The checker is the Nu Html Checker, the same conformance checker behind the W3C's own validation service. Any message it produces, of any severity, stops the change.
Standards conformance is about the markup, and this claim says nothing more than that: valid HTML is not a promise that a page is accurate, fast, or accessible. Accessibility is the separate claim above.
Specification published by WHATWG. Conformance verified by Elysium on every change; no third party reviews or approves this site.
How we hold ourselves to this
Every standard above is checked automatically, on every change, before it reaches this site. A claim that stops being verifiable is removed from this page rather than quietly left standing, and a credential is listed only while the organisation that issued it can confirm it.
The standard everyone acting for Elysium is held to - integrity, customer privacy, safety, and how to raise a concern - is a separate statement: see Ethics & Conduct.
