TfGM Website Accessibility Update for Oldham 2026

Transport for Greater Manchester has admitted its main travel website falls short of the accessibility rules it is legally bound to meet, leaving some Oldham residents unable to plan journeys independently. A fresh statement slipped out last month shows tfgm.com is only 'partially compliant' with national web standards, with pop-up chat boxes, PDF timetables and even route maps creating barriers for blind, deaf and mobility-impaired users.

The biggest day-to-day nuisance is the live chat and survey windows. When someone zooms the page to 400% on a desktop, a common way for people with low vision to read, those pop-ups blanket the screen and cannot be shrunk or moved. The same problem trips up speech-recognition software, forcing users to close the box before they can finish typing a station name or fare query.

Blind passengers who rely on screen readers are also locked out of many PDF documents. Timetables, disruption leaflets and consultation plans uploaded to the site often arrive without tags that tell the software where headings or tables begin, so the page is read as one long, confusing block. Complex diagrams, such as the new Bee Network map, are posted without text descriptions, leaving the image meaningless.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing travellers face a quieter but equally frustrating gap. While TfGM says every video will eventually carry an audio description of on-screen action, tight production schedules mean some clips go live without it. The result is that safety announcements or how-to guides shared on social media may be half-complete for viewers who cannot hear background narration.

Oldham residents who hit these snags can ask for information in another format, and the transport body promises an answer within five working days. Yet the underlying faults remain on the 'to-do' list: an external audit by Zoonou in April 2025 confirmed the same failures now published in the February statement, suggesting little has been fixed since the checks were carried out.