Accessibility

Our target

We are working toward WCAG 2.1 Level AA. We have not completed a formal audit against it, so we do not claim conformance. What follows is what is in place and what we know is missing.

What is in place

• Semantic HTML. Pages are built with real headings, lists, landmarks and link text rather than styled generic elements, which is the foundation everything else depends on.
• A declared page language (lang="en"), so screen readers pronounce content correctly.
• A skip-to-content link on every page. It stays off-screen until focused, then appears at the top left, and its target moves keyboard focus into the main region rather than only scrolling the page.
• Designed keyboard focus styling. Focus is indicated with a deliberate high-contrast outline and offset rather than left to browser defaults, so you can always see where you are.
• Reduced-motion support. If your system asks for reduced motion, the site honours it: scroll behaviour becomes instant, content reveals appear without transition, background motion stops, animation is effectively disabled, and the animated statistics paint their final value immediately instead of counting up.
• Screen-reader-only text utilities, so labels can be provided to assistive technology without cluttering the visual design.
• Labelled search. The site search uses a search landmark role and its input carries an accessible label.
• Accessible form errors. When an enquiry form is rejected, the fields at fault are marked invalid programmatically, each error message is tied to the input it belongs to rather than just sitting near it, and a summary is announced to screen readers. Fields carry autocomplete hints so a browser or assistive tool can fill them, and every form on a page gets its own field ids so two forms can never collide.
• Text, not pictures of text. Data on this site is real text and real tables, so it can be read aloud, resized, translated and copied.
• Descriptive link text. Links say where they go rather than "click here."
• Image alt text is a required field in our content schema.
• No autoplaying video or carousels, and no time limits anywhere on the site.

Known gaps

These are real and we are not going to describe them as anything else.

• Colour contrast has not been formally audited across every component and both themes. We believe body text is comfortable; we have not verified every state of every element against the AA ratio.
• The map explorer is a stylized visual canvas with no non-visual equivalent. If you cannot use it, the same neighborhoods are all reachable as ordinary pages through the directory, but that is a workaround rather than a fix.
• Long neighborhood pages have no in-page skip target beyond the sticky section index. On a page with a dozen sections and several long inventories, that is a real amount of navigation.
• Alt text exists only where the content supplies it. The field is required by the schema, but a required field is not the same as a good description, and we have not reviewed them for quality.
• No formal audit and no assistive-technology testing programme yet. Nothing here has been tested end to end with a screen reader by someone who uses one daily, which is the only test that really counts.
• Third-party and embedded content, where we add it later, may not meet the same standard, and we will say so at the point of use.

What we are doing about it

Next, in rough priority order: run a contrast audit across the token palette and every component state; give the long neighborhood pages proper in-page navigation targets; work out a non-visual equivalent for the map explorer; review alt text for quality rather than presence; and then commission real assistive-technology testing rather than relying on automated checkers.

We will update this page as items move from the gap list to the in-place list, and change the reviewed date when we do.

Corrections to this page

An earlier version of this statement listed designed focus styling and reduced-motion support as missing. Both were in fact already implemented and had been since the site's first build, and we were wrong to list them. One narrower finding was correct: the animated statistics on the home page ignored the reduced-motion setting and counted up regardless. That has been fixed, and they now paint their final value immediately.

We are recording the correction rather than quietly editing it out, because a page about honesty in accessibility claims should be honest about its own.

If something blocks you

This matters more to us than the list above. If any part of this site prevents you from getting information you need, tell us:

• What page you were on.
• What you were trying to do.
• What happened, and what browser, device or assistive technology you were using, if you know.

Use the contact route on this site. We will respond, and if you need information that is trapped in an inaccessible part of the site, we will send it to you in a format that works for you while we fix the underlying problem. You should not have to wait for a code change to get an answer about a neighborhood.

A note on our content

Some of what makes this guide useful is dense: data tables, long inventories of parks and schools, and detailed housing figures. We are conscious that density and accessibility pull against each other. Our approach is to keep the underlying markup simple and semantic so that assistive technology can navigate it, rather than to simplify the content itself. If a particular table or inventory is hard to use with your tools, that is exactly the kind of report we want.