Accessibility statement

Our commitment, and the duty behind it

The regulations that require public sector websites to meet an accessibility standard do not apply to us — we are a private company, and that does not change because some of our care is arranged by councils or the NHS. We are not going to hide behind that.

The Equality Act does apply, and its duty is anticipatory: we are expected to make reasonable adjustments in advance, for disabled people who have not yet arrived and have not complained. So we have built to the standard the public sector regulations use — WCAG 2.2 Level AA — and published this statement in the same structure, voluntarily.

How accessible this website is

This website is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA. “Partially” is honest rather than modest: we have measured a great deal and had none of it independently audited, and until someone outside this project has tested it we will not claim full conformance.

We have not found an AA failure in what we have measured. That is not the same as there not being one.

What we have built, with the numbers

Every figure here was measured on the pages as they are served, not taken from a design file.

Text contrast

Body text measures 13.26:1 on the page background and 11.75:1 on the alternating band — both past AAA, which asks for 7:1. The quietest text anywhere on the contact page measures 8.01:1. Nothing on the site relies on the AA minimum of 4.5:1.

Text size

No sentence is set below 16px. There is one 14px size in the system and it is restricted to labels and column headings — never prose.

Targets

Everything you can click or tap is at least 44 × 44px with 8px between it and the next one; buttons are 48px. WCAG 2.2 asks for 24 × 24px, so this is comfortably past it. Whole rows are tappable rather than just the words in them.

Keyboard

Everything works from the keyboard, in a sensible order, and the focus ring is never removed. There is a skip link as the first thing on the page.

Motion

Every moving thing on this site is CSS driven by scroll position, and every one of them is designed so that its resting state is a finished layout. If the animation never runs — because you have motion switched off, because your browser does not support it, or because a tab was in the background — you get a complete page and lose only emphasis. The one place text changes as you scroll never drops below 7.62:1 at its dimmest.

Forms

One question at a time. Errors are sentences that say what to do, shown beside the field and in a summary that takes focus. We never validate while you are still typing or the moment you leave a field, because that punishes slow typing. Nothing you have already told us is asked for twice.

Without JavaScript

Every page reads and navigates completely. Content is never hidden waiting for a script to reveal it, and the emergency numbers in particular do not depend on one. The enquiry form is the exception: with JavaScript off you will see the first question but cannot get past it. If that affects you, use any route on our contact page and we will take the details ourselves. We are working on a version that submits without it.

Structure

One first-level heading per page, no skipped levels, real landmarks, and real form elements rather than styled divs pretending to be them.

Settings you can change on the site itself

The accessibility control in the header changes the site without you needing to change your browser or your device:

• Larger text, in steps.
• More line spacing and letter spacing.
• A higher-contrast palette.
• Reduced motion, which stops every effect on the site.
• Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface designed for low vision. Choosing it overrides our display typeface everywhere — your choice wins over our design.

Your choice is remembered on your own device and never sent to us. Our cookies policy explains exactly what that stores.

If you already have preferences set at the operating-system level — reduced motion, larger text, high contrast — the site follows them without you doing anything.

What is not right yet

Known, and being worked on:

• The search box has keyboard and screen-reader problems. Closing it does not return you to where you were on the page, and it does not announce how many results it found. A screen reader can also still reach the page behind it while it is open. We have measured all of this and not yet fixed it. Everything the search box finds is reachable through the ordinary navigation and the footer.
• The enquiry form needs JavaScript. With it switched off you can see the first question but cannot complete or send the form. Every other way of reaching us on the contact page works without it.
• Nobody outside this project has tested it. No independent audit and no testing with disabled users. Measurement by the people who built something is the weakest form of evidence there is, and it is currently all we have.
• Icons come from a typeface loaded from another company’s server. If that request is blocked or slow, the icon names can appear as words — you might briefly see “arrow_forward” instead of an arrow. No icon is the only way to understand anything on the page, so nothing becomes unusable, but it looks broken and we intend to serve the font ourselves.
• The header floats over the page. We offset every anchor so a linked heading does not land underneath it, but there may be places where moving focus with the keyboard puts the focused item behind the header. If you find one, please tell us — this is WCAG 2.2 criterion 2.4.11 and we would want to fix it.
• Much of the writing is placeholder. Anywhere you see “TBD” the real content has not been supplied yet. We show the gap rather than filling it with something invented, which is deliberate, but it does mean parts of the site do not yet say anything useful.
• No images have been supplied. Photographs are marked placeholders. When real ones arrive each will need a real description written for it.
• We have not tested with every screen reader. No results yet for JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver or TalkBack specifically.

Getting information from us in another format

This is a legal duty on us, not a courtesy, for anyone whose care is arranged by the NHS or a council — and we apply it to everyone, because working out who is who before helping someone communicate would be absurd.

We can arrange, at no cost to you:

• A British Sign Language interpreter.
• An interpreter for a spoken language.
• Relay UK, if you use text relay.
• Large print, easy read, braille or audio.
• A reply by text only, if a phone call does not work for you.
• Someone who supports you being included in what we send.

The standard requires us to ask, record it, and act on it — not to wait to be asked. There is a box for it on the enquiry form, and once you have told us once you should not have to tell us again.

Telling us about a problem

If something on this site stops you doing what you came to do, we want to know — it is the fastest way anything here gets better.

Use any route on our contact page, and say it is about the website. We aim to reply within one working day, and to tell you either when it will be fixed or why it will not be.

If you are not satisfied with our answer you can take it further through our complaints route. Because we are not a public body, the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s enforcement route for public sector websites does not apply here; a complaint about disability discrimination in a service is a matter for the Equality Advisory and Support Service or, ultimately, the courts.

Technical information and how we tested

This site relies on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It is built to WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Every page works with JavaScript switched off.

Testing so far has been:

• Contrast measured programmatically on the rendered pages, for every text colour against the ground it actually sits on — not sampled by eye.
• Target sizes measured from the rendered elements.
• Keyboard-only navigation, by hand.
• Heading structure and landmarks checked on each page.
• Layout checked for horizontal overflow at 390px, 606px and 1440px.
• The site checked with JavaScript disabled.

TBD — the date of the first independent audit. That is the gap that matters most on this page.

About this statement

TBD — the date this statement was prepared and the date it was last reviewed. It will be reviewed whenever the site changes in a way that affects any figure above, and at least once a year.