Accessibility

Where Councils Stand should be usable by everyone, including people who use a screen reader, a keyboard, voice control or magnification.

What you can expect

• Text can be enlarged to 400% without loss of content or sideways scrolling, and the layout adapts to small screens.
• Every part of the site can be used with a keyboard alone, with a visible focus ring. A "Skip to main content" link is the first stop on every page.
• Pages follow your device's light or dark setting and its "reduce motion" setting.
• Text and controls are meant to meet the guidelines' colour contrast levels, in light and dark modes.
• Progress while a briefing is prepared, and the briefing when it is ready, are announced to screen readers.
• Votes are shown with marks and words, never colour alone. Charts of members by party repeat their figures as a list.
• The site uses no cookies and needs no account. The text pages, such as this one, work without JavaScript, and the list of councils, each council's page and each vote can be read without it.

Standard and testing

The site aims to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA. It was last tested on 6 November 2026, on a copy of the site running on test data:

• the home page (before and after a search), the list of councils, a council's page, a named vote that can't be found, the about, how it works, privacy, corrections, accessibility, terms and not-found pages were checked with the axe-core automated checker (version 4.10.2), at desktop and phone widths, in light and dark modes. It found no failures against WCAG 2.2 A or AA. The same automated check now runs on every change to the site's code, on these pages and the press and status pages, and on the council and vote pages with their scripts turned off;
• on the same pages, the keyboard was used to move through every link and control, checking that each one can be reached, in order, with a visible focus ring;
• each page was checked at 320 pixels wide (the same as 400% zoom on a desktop screen) for sideways scrolling.

These checks were made by the site's developer, partly with scripts. Automated checks find only some problems. The site has not yet been tested by people who use assistive technology, or with a screen reader by hand: that is still to do. If something doesn't work for you, please tell us.

Known limitations

• Asking a question, filtering the list of councils and opening a saved briefing need JavaScript. Without it, the list of councils, council pages and vote pages show their content as plain text.
• Briefings are written by AI. They are checked for citations, not for plain English, so some may be harder to read than we would like.
• Quotations are reproduced as they appear in councils' minutes, including any errors, so that they can be checked against the council's record.
• The minutes themselves are on councils' own websites, often as PDF documents, whose accessibility we can't control.

Reporting a problem

If you find something hard to use, or need information in a different format, use the report form or email admin@wherecouncilsstand.com. We aim to reply within 10 working days.