This statement applies to Quorate, the meeting administration service used by parish and town councils in England. It covers the pages a clerk and her councillors sign in to.
We want as many people as possible to be able to use this service. That means you should be able to change colours and contrast, navigate the whole service with a keyboard, and read it at the text size you need.
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.
How accessible this website is
We know some parts of this service are not yet fully accessible.
- The agendas, notices, summonses and minutes Quorate produces are Word documents, and they are not yet tagged for assistive technology. A screen reader may not announce their headings and structure correctly.
- We have not yet tested the service with a screen reader, so we cannot say how well it works with NVDA, JAWS or VoiceOver.
- We have not yet tested the service at 200% zoom, or on a screen 320 pixels wide, so we cannot say whether everything reflows and stays readable.
- No independent accessibility audit has been carried out. Everything we have tested, we tested ourselves.
Feedback and contact information
If you find a problem, or you need something from Quorate in a format you can use, email accessibility@quorate.org. Tell us the page you were on and what happened. We will reply within 5 working days.
If the problem is with something your council has published rather than with Quorate itself, your council is the right people to ask, and its clerk is the contact. We will say so if you write to us by mistake, and we will not simply leave it with you.
Enforcement procedure
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the 'accessibility regulations').
If you're not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
Technical information about this website's accessibility
Quorate is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
Compliance status
The website has been tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standard. That testing is not yet complete; what has and has not been tested is set out under Preparation of this accessibility statement below.
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard, due to the non-compliances listed below.
Non-accessible content
The content listed below is non-accessible for the following reasons.
Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations
The agendas, notices, summonses and minutes Quorate produces are Word documents, and they are not yet tagged. Their headings, lists and reading order are not exposed to assistive technology, so a screen reader cannot navigate them the way it navigates a web page. We are working on this and expect to fix it before any council publishes a document produced by Quorate.
Where a council needs one of these documents in another format in the meantime, email accessibility@quorate.org and we will supply it.
Disproportionate burden
We are not claiming that any part of this service would be a disproportionate burden to make accessible.
Content that's not within the scope of the accessibility regulations
We are not relying on this exemption for any part of this service.
What we're doing to improve accessibility
- Testing the service with NVDA and with VoiceOver, and fixing what those passes find.
- Testing every page at 200% zoom and at 320 pixels wide.
- Tagging the documents Quorate produces, so their structure survives into Word and into print.
- Commissioning an independent accessibility audit.
Preparation of this accessibility statement
This statement was prepared on . It was last reviewed on .
This website was last tested on against the WCAG 2.2 AA standard. The test was carried out by Quorate. We tested our own service; we did not commission anyone else to test it.
What that testing covers, run automatically on every change we make:
- Automated checks with axe on every page in the clerk's meeting loop, which catch roughly a third of the problems a person would find.
- Colour contrast, asserted for every colour pairing the service uses, in the light and dark appearances and in all three colour themes.
- The keyboard, as far as markup can prove it: that every control can be reached by tabbing, that nothing is clickable without also being focusable, that there is a skip link, and that each page carries the landmarks a screen reader navigates by.
- That the language of each page is declared, and that motion is suppressed for anyone whose device asks for it.
What it does not cover: a real screen reader, a real browser at 200% zoom, and the documents Quorate produces. Those are the three things listed above as outstanding, and they are outstanding because a machine cannot stand in for them.
Your council's own statement
The accessibility regulations bind the council rather than Quorate. If your council publishes pages of its own, it needs its own accessibility statement covering them, and this one does not stand in for it. What is here is the technical detail about Quorate that your statement can draw on.