Accessibility Statement

About this statement

This statement applies to the About Greater Manchester website.

This website is run by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

Please also see accessibility information relating to this site's use of:

Using this website

We want as many people as possible to be able to use this website.

We are always working to make our website as accessible and usable as possible.

For example, that means you should be able to:

  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

We have also tried to make the website text easy to understand.

  • AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.

How accessible this website is

This website is partially-compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA.

We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:

  • many of our videos are embedded from YouTube and may feature labelling from YouTube itself, which is incorrect or not sufficiently descriptive
  • iFrames do not include alt-text
  • documents are mostly or partially compliant - see the PDF and Documents section of this statement for more details.

What to do if you cannot access parts of this website

If you need information on this website in a different format, like accessible PDF, large print, easy read, audio recording or braille please:

Contact our general enquiries team

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact the GMCA digital team:

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

Greater Manchester Combined Authority 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

This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 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

iFrame titles

All iFrames across the website currently do not include titles.

This fails WCAG 2.1 success criterion 2.4.1, Bypass Blocks and 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value

The iFrames are included using a third-party solution, which does not provide the option to add alt-text. We are in conversations with the third-party supplier to update this.

PDFs and other documents

Our documents are mostly or partially compliant. We use Microsoft Office tools and Adobe Acrobat Pro to check and remediate accessibility issues where we can. Our focus is on meeting these core areas: text that can be read by screen readers, use of hierarchical headings to aid navigation through documents, reading order, alt-text on images, text explanations of more complex diagrams and charts.

Some documents are tested using automated checks through Adobe Acrobat Pro, whereas others have more rigorous blend of automated and manual testing, including use of PAC2021 software. This discrepancy is due to different authoring across the organisation, and those occasions where documents are outsourced to graphic design agencies with set approach to accessible document creation.

We know some documents still fail in some areas, for example some documents may have:

  • incorrect, invalid or inappropriate tags (e.g. p tag instead of a bulleted list tag or p tag within a td tag).
  • tables with irregular table rows and empty cells
  • tables with header rows defined but scope not defined (no associated sub-cells)
  • links without alt-text
  • empty paragraph tags
  • path objects not tagged
  • link annotations not nested inside link structure elements
  • alternative descriptions missing for annotations

Tables are sometimes used to convey quite complex visual data or structural relationships. We encourage our authors to produce simple tables where possible and to use text rather than tables if they are not explicitly publishing data. However, non-compliant tables are sometimes still present in our documents.

How we tested this website

This website was last tested on 8th February 2022. The test was carried out internally by Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

When deciding on a sample of pages to test, we chose based on:

  • our presumed most popular pages (home page and parent pages)
  • pages that gave a good example of each one of our templates
  • pages including images, multimedia content and interactive elements

We used free-to-use developer tools which check each page against accessibility issues. A manual audit was also conducted.

This statement was prepared on 8th February 2022. It was last updated on 24th February 2022.