AABRS® is committed to making its website accessible to as many people as possible, including those who rely on assistive technology or have difficulty using standard web features. This statement explains the standard we aim to meet, where we currently fall short, and how to tell us about any problem you encounter.
The Standard We Aim to Meet
We aim to conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 at level AA, the current standard published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines ask that content is perceivable, operable, understandable and robust.
WCAG 2.2 added nine success criteria to version 2.1, covering things like target size, focus visibility and consistent help. We have not yet assessed the site against those new criteria, so our current assessment below is against the 2.1 requirements that carry over into 2.2.
How We Are Doing Against It
This website is partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 level AA. “Partially conformant” means parts of the site do not meet the standard. We would rather set out what those parts are than describe the position in general terms, so they are listed below with what we know about each.
Two of the problems this statement used to list are now fixed. Both fixes went live on 7 September 2026.
- A “skip to main content” link. Press the Tab key once on any page and the link appears at the top left. Press Enter and you go straight to the main content, past the menu. Before this, anyone using a keyboard or a screen reader had to move through the whole menu on every page.
- Faint text colours. Several of the colours we used for links, for small print and for form error messages were too faint against their background. We made them darker. We kept our orange as a background colour and put dark text on it, instead of white text.
Three problems remain. We tested each one on 11 September 2026.
- Links made only of a picture. Some links on the site contain a picture and no words. A screen reader has nothing to read out, so it cannot tell you where the link goes. Our logo, at the top of every page, is one of these. The picture links in our case study lists and our news lists are others. This is the problem on the list that affects the most pages.
- The main heading on our home page. It is white text over a photograph. Where the photograph is pale, the heading is hard to read. Nearly half the area behind it is fainter than the standard allows. We found this in the test on 11 September 2026, so it is new to this statement. The fix is a change to the design of that banner, and we have not made it yet.
- An image with no description. This was a general problem with our older images. It is now down to one that we know of: an award badge on our home page, which has no description for a screen reader. Every other image we checked either has a description or is marked as decoration, which is correct.
How we tested. These problems were first found by automated testing in July 2026. We checked them against the code behind the site on 20 August 2026. On 11 September 2026 we tested the live website itself in a browser. We measured the text and background colours on four pages. We filled in a form wrongly on purpose, so we could measure the error messages. We used the keyboard to check the new skip link. We checked every link and every image on those four pages for a description.
That test confirmed both of the fixes. It also confirmed that the picture links and the missing image description are still there, which we had not been able to check before. The problem with the home page heading came out of the same test.
Four pages are not the whole site, and we would rather say so than imply more. Colours and the skip link are set once, in the design the whole site shares, so a good result on four pages does tell us about every page. Links and images are added a page at a time, so it does not. There may be more links made only of a picture, and more images without a description, on pages we have not checked yet.
We have still not carried out a full manual audit. That would mean going through the whole site using only a keyboard, testing it with a screen reader, and checking the criteria that are new in WCAG 2.2. We have now done the keyboard test on one thing, the skip link, and not on the rest. So this statement describes what we know rather than everything there is to know, and there may be problems we have not found.
Telling Us About an Accessibility Problem
If you cannot access any part of this website, or you find something difficult to use, we want to hear about it. Tell us what you were trying to do and what went wrong. We aim to reply within five working days, and we will provide the information you need in a format that works for you, whether or not we have fixed the underlying problem yet.
- Email: info@aabrs.com
- Phone: 0208 444 3400
This statement was prepared on 14 July 2026 and last reviewed on 11 September 2026. That review was a test of the live website, not only a read of this page. We review this statement as the website changes and as we work through the problems above.