Accessibility statement
What we target, what we have measured, how we measured it, and what an independent auditor has not yet confirmed.
The target
WCAG 2.2 Level AA for the public website and for the customer Workspace. This is a design target we hold ourselves to and measure against — it is not a certification, and the distinction matters for the reason set out at the end of this document.
What has been measured
Every public page this release introduced or materially changed is tested with axe-core at four viewports — 390, 768, 1024 and 1440 CSS pixels — against five rule sets: wcag2a, wcag2aa, wcag21a, wcag21aa and wcag22aa. Tests run against the deployed origin, not a local build, because several of the defects we have found were invisible to a local render.
The standing result on the surfaces measured is zero critical and zero serious violations. Where a release has not met that, it has not shipped.
What automated testing does not cover
axe-core finds roughly a third of WCAG. Anyone claiming conformance on an automated pass alone is claiming more than they measured. So the same harness additionally checks, at every viewport, the faults that have actually reached this site before and that axe does not report:
- Horizontal overflow — a page that scrolls sideways on a phone. This caught a 199-pixel sideways scroll that an
overflow-x: autocontainer did not prevent. - Target size — measured from the laid-out box rather than the declared CSS, because padding and line-height decide it.
- Heading order — a skipped level breaks navigation by heading, which is how a screen-reader user reads a long page.
- Links with no accessible name — an anchor whose only content is an image with an empty alt.
- Console and page errors — a page that threw during hydration can pass an axe run on the half of itself that rendered.
Design decisions that carry accessibility
- Colour is never the only signal. Every capability status differs in border pattern and weight as well as hue, and every status prints its own word.
- Data tables become labelled lists on a phone rather than a horizontal scroller. A five-column matrix read 350 pixels at a time is not readable however well it scrolls.
- Every scrollable region is keyboard-reachable and named.
- Caveats carry the same visual weight as claims. A limitation set in small grey text is a limitation designed not to be read.
- Reduced motion is respected; smooth scrolling and every transition revert under
prefers-reduced-motion. - Every product screenshot has alt text describing what is in it, not what it is called.
Known limitations
Stated precisely
- This has not been independently audited. Our measurement is automated testing plus targeted manual checks by the team that built the pages. An independent WCAG 2.2 AA audit is listed in the Procurement Center as requiring an independent party, and it has not been carried out.
- No screen-reader testing programme with disabled users has been run. We use assistive technology in development; we have not run structured testing with people who rely on it daily, and that is a different and better form of evidence than ours.
- Coverage is the public estate and the customer Workspace surfaces we measure per release, not every page of a 246-page estate on every release.
- Public body content is English. The interface shell is translated into English, Kiswahili, French, Portuguese and Arabic; the body copy is not, which is an accessibility limitation for a non-English reader as much as a localisation one.
Documents and exports
Accessible output validation is part of publication approval rather than an afterthought: a governed publication carries structure a reader can navigate. We do not claim that every exported PDF meets PDF/UA — that is a separate standard with separate evidence, and we have not produced it.
Telling us about a barrier
If any part of this site or the platform is not usable for you, tell us at [email protected] and describe what you were trying to do. We will tell you what we find and when it will be fixed, including when the answer is that it will take a while.
Why this statement does not claim conformance
A conformance claim is a statement that an evaluation was carried out to a defined methodology and that the result was full conformance. We measure continuously and hold a hard release gate at zero critical and zero serious findings, which is a real and enforced standard — and it is not the same thing. Publishing “WCAG 2.2 AA compliant” on the strength of our own automated testing would be the kind of claim this whole platform is built to avoid making.