Accessibility

What the site does

• Links, buttons, form fields and the controls in the interactive sections all work from the keyboard. On a printed schedule page, the arrow keys move from one amount to the next.
• A blue outline shows which element has the keyboard focus.
• On every page, the first stop for the Tab key is a “Skip to content” link.
• Form fields have labels. Search results, and the rows read from a printed page, are announced to screen readers as they change.
• Charts and the map are labeled for screen readers. Each printed page is shown next to the amounts read from it, as text.
• If your device is set to reduce motion, animation is off, numbers appear at their final value, and the scroll sections are laid out as still pages.
• Body text is near-black on white, and grey labels and captions have a contrast ratio of 5.2 to 1. Links and buttons, blue on white or white on blue, are at 6.3 to 1.

The map

The coverage map is drawn on a canvas, so a screen reader hears one description of the whole map rather than each authority on it. The coverage page also has the full table of the authorities in the dataset, which you can search, sort and filter.

Known limits

• The printed schedule pages are images. Their text alternative is the list of amounts read from each page; titles and notes printed on a page are not repeated as text.
• A screen reader hears a chart’s title, not the value of each bar. The values are printed on the chart.
• On the home page, the pile of schedule pages spreads when you drag it with a mouse or a finger. From the keyboard, the arrow keys read the pages one by one instead; there is no keyboard way to spread the pile itself.
• The source documents we link to are published by the housing authorities. Some are scanned pages with no text layer, which screen readers cannot read, and we cannot change them.

Contact

If part of the site does not work for you, write to hello@allowances.dev and tell us the page and what happened.

This statement is our own assessment. The site has not had an outside audit.