Accessibility statement

What we are working to, and what we are not claiming

We build to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, Level AA, as our design target.

We do not claim to conform to Level AA, or to any other level. No independent accessibility audit of this site has been carried out, and we have not tested it with disabled readers using their own assistive technology. Claiming a conformance level we have not measured would tell a reader who hits a barrier that the barrier is theirs. This statement is a self-assessment by the people who build the site, based on a review of its own code, and it is dated above.

What is in place today

• A “Skip to content” link as the first stop on every public page and on the signed-in reader and administration screens, so keyboard and screen-reader users do not traverse the navigation on every page.
• A visible keyboard focus indicator on links, buttons and disclosure controls throughout the site, including where the ring sits on a dark background.
• The current page marked in the signed-in navigation both programmatically and visually, with a shape and weight change rather than colour alone.
• Landmark structure — banner, navigation, main and footer — with the navigation regions named, so a screen reader can jump between them.
• Smooth scrolling and other motion suppressed when your system asks for reduced motion.
• A declared page language, so a screen reader pronounces the page correctly.
• No audio or video that starts on its own, anywhere on the site. We publish no media that plays automatically.
• Articles rendered as real text — never as images of text — so they reflow, resize, and can be read aloud or restyled.

Known gaps

These are the limitations we are aware of. It is not a claim that the list is complete — an unaudited site does not know all of its barriers, which is the point of the reporting channel below.

• No audit and no user testing. Nothing here has been verified by an accessibility specialist or by a disabled reader.
• Limited automated checking. Our build catches a subset of accessibility problems — missing image alternatives, malformed ARIA — but no automated accessibility scan runs against rendered pages as part of releasing.
• Colour contrast is calculated, not measured. We check contrast for the core palette rather than for every component in every state.
• The account menu on signed-in pages is a native disclosure control. It opens and closes from the keyboard, but it does not close when you press Escape.
• Third-party content we do not control. The security challenge on our sign-in, registration and newsletter forms is provided by Cloudflare, and any advertising we run is served by Google. Their accessibility is theirs, not ours — but a barrier in one of them still stops you, so please report it and we will pursue it with them or route around it.

Report a barrier

Tell us and we will fix it. Accessibility reports reach the newsroom through the same channel as corrections — our contact page.

It helps if you can include:

• the address of the page,
• what you were trying to do,
• your browser and any assistive technology you were using, including its version if you know it,
• and what happened instead.

If an accessibility barrier stops you from reading a public record we have published, say so in your message and we will supply the information in another format.

Report an accessibility barrier

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