Accessibility statement

Conformance status

“Partially conformant” means that some parts of the content do not yet fully meet the standard. WCAG 2.1 is published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and defines requirements for making web content more accessible to people with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language and neurological disabilities.

Measures we take

Accessibility is considered when features are designed, built and reviewed — not retrofitted. Specifically:

• Semantic structure

  Every page uses landmark regions (header, main, navigation, footer) and a single, logically ordered heading hierarchy, so screen-reader users can navigate by heading or region.

• Keyboard operability

  All interactive controls — navigation, filters, search, the project map controls and the image gallery lightbox — are reachable and operable with a keyboard alone. Dialogs trap focus while open and return focus to the element that opened them.

• Visible focus

  A clear focus indicator is shown on every focusable element, and a skip-to-content link is the first item in the tab order on each page.

• Text alternatives

  Images carry descriptive alt text; decorative icons are hidden from assistive technology. Data tables have captions and scoped row and column headers.

• Forms and status messages

  All inputs have persistent, programmatically associated labels; required fields are marked in text as well as visually. Success and error messages are announced through live regions rather than colour alone.

• Colour and contrast

  Text and essential interface elements meet the WCAG 2.1 AA contrast minimums (4.5:1 for body text, 3:1 for large text and interface components). Colour is never the only means of conveying information.

• Responsive and zoomable

  Layouts reflow to 320px width and support 200% text zoom without loss of content or functionality. Content is not restricted to a single screen orientation.

• Automated and manual testing

  The codebase is linted with eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y, and pages are checked manually with keyboard-only navigation and a screen reader before release.

Known limitations

Despite our efforts, some content falls short of Level AA. We are aware of the following and are working to address them:

• Interactive project map

  The map at /map relies on a third-party mapping library. A keyboard-accessible list and filter view of the same projects is provided at /projects, and the underlying data can be downloaded in full from the open-data hub.

• Uploaded documents

  Reports, policy briefs and other PDFs in the resources library are supplied by partner organisations. Some older documents are scanned images without a text layer and are therefore not readable by screen readers. We ask contributors for accessible originals and will supply an alternative format on request.

• Partner-supplied images

  Alt text on partner-contributed photography is added during editorial review. Where a description is still generic, we are working through the backlog.

• Embedded third-party content

  Registration forms and videos hosted by external providers are outside our control and may not meet the same standard. We flag these and provide a direct contact route as an alternative.

Compatibility

The platform is designed to work with current versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, used together with the screen readers built into those platforms (NVDA and Narrator on Windows, VoiceOver on macOS and iOS, TalkBack on Android). It does not depend on JavaScript for its core content: article, project, technology and resource pages are rendered on the server and remain readable if scripts fail to load.

Alternative formats

If a document or dataset on this site is not accessible to you, we will provide the information in another format. The full project register is also available as machine-readable CSV and GeoJSON from the open data hub.

Feedback and reporting a barrier

We welcome your feedback. If you encounter a barrier, please tell us what you were trying to do, the page address, and the browser and assistive technology you were using. We aim to respond within five business days.