Oldham fire service website fails accessibility checks

Oldham residents who rely on screen readers or keyboard navigation are being shut out of large parts of the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service website, an official audit has revealed. Tests carried out by Shaw Trust on 29 October 2024 found that manchesterfire.gov.uk fails the legally required WCAG 2.2 AA standard in more than a dozen ways, from pictures with no description to forms that cannot be filled in without a mouse.

The problems go beyond awkward design. Blind users meet images that carry no text alternative, deaf users meet old safety videos that carry no subtitles, and anyone who enlarges text for poor sight finds whole sections of the page slide out of reach. Keyboard-only visitors can lose their place completely because the site does not show where the cursor has landed.

Documents attached to the site add another layer of frustration. Many PDFs use 10-point fonts, jumbled reading orders and tables whose headers are invisible to assistive software. Even the translated leaflets the service hands out in Oldham communities arrive as print-only files, so screen readers fall silent.

Fire chiefs say they are now asking staff to publish plain-text versions and to build accessibility into new material from the start, but they have set no timetable. Older videos published before September 2020 remain exempt from captioning rules, and third-party education clips borrowed from other agencies may stay inaccessible because the brigade does not control them.

Anyone who hits a wall can complain to the Equality Advisory and Support Service, yet the statement itself admits the list of faults may not be complete. Until the fixes arrive, residents who need the information most are left to phone 0161 778 7000 or email and hope someone sends a format they can actually use.