Accessibility
A public record is only as public as the people who can actually read it. This page states the standard this site is held to, how that was checked, and — because a statement claiming everything works is worth nothing — where it currently falls short.
Last updated: 16 August 2026
The standard
VoteRights targets WCAG 2.2 Level AA: the level EN 301 549 and the European Accessibility Act reference, and the one public bodies across the EU and UK are held to. AA is treated as the floor rather than the goal — body text is set far past the contrast minimum, and motion is stopped site-wide rather than merely shortened when your system asks for less of it.
How this was checked
Every page type was run through axe-core against the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 A and AA rule sets: the home page, the index and detail pages of each collection, the Academy’s long-form articles, the statistics tables, the search and contact forms, and the legal pages. Each was tested in both the light and the dark theme, because the two resolve different colour tokens and at one point only one of them passed, and in Arabic as well as English so the right-to-left layout was measured rather than assumed.
What a machine cannot check
Automated rules cover perhaps a third of WCAG, so the rest was checked separately. The focus ring is defined once, globally, so no control can quietly lose it, and it is drawn in the accent colour at better than 6:1 against either theme. Tab order is document order — there is no positive tabindex anywhere to reorder it. The navigation drawer, the language panel and the search palette each close on Escape and hand focus back to the control that opened them. The site was reflowed to 320 pixels, the width at which WCAG measures 400% zoom, and no longer scrolls sideways at it. Scroll containers that used to be mouse-only — the statistics table, the tables inside Academy articles — are now reachable and scrollable from the keyboard.
Where it falls short
The markers on the world map are 15 to 22 pixels across, under the 24 that WCAG 2.2 asks of a target. A marker means what it means because of where it sits, so it cannot simply be made bigger, and the exemption for that case applies — but the honest version is that the map is fiddly to hit precisely. Every case it points to is also reachable as ordinary text from the Elections index and from each country page, and that is the better route if the map is awkward. Separately, most languages here are machine-translated from the English source, so the wording in them can read stiffly; the language and direction attributes are correct in every one, so a screen reader still announces them in the right voice.
What you can rely on
Reading the site needs no JavaScript, no mouse, and no colour vision: every status shown as a colour is also written as a word or carries its own icon. A skip link jumps past the navigation to the content. Headings form a real document outline rather than being large text. Every page declares its language, and right-to-left languages are laid out as such. The light and dark themes are both first-class, and the choice is remembered rather than dictated by your operating system.
If something is not usable
Report it. A barrier nobody reports is a barrier that stays. Write to the contact address with the page and what went wrong, and it will be handled as a defect rather than a feature request — there is no separate accessibility backlog, it goes in the same queue as everything else.