We are committed to making our site universally accessible and user friendly and aim to meet: 

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at levels A and AA. 

To see full details of how our platform complies with WCAG 2.2, you can view our July 2025 Accessibility Conformance Report, which is based upon ITI’s Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT), WCAG edition. 

For requests for accessible versions of documents on our site, or for more general accessibility issues with the platform, please contact [email protected]. A member of our accessibility team will follow up within five working days to identify how we can best meet your needs.   

Requests for accessible versions of historical source documents will be treated on a case-by-case basis, some documents that rely on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology or image scans will be assessed for feasibility and complexity of delivering an accessible version.  In some cases, we may not be able to meet requests, though we are looking ahead at future technological advancements that can increase the volume of historical documents that can be presented in a fully accessible format.  

We recognise that we have some distance to travel in making our platform fully WCAG 2.2 compliant so that visual, hearing, mobility or cognitive impairments are fully supported. 

Below are some current issues that impact journeys and navigation on the site: 

• Colour contrast for visible elements does not always meet the 4.5:1 or greater level.
• Our OCR created content does not have a supporting text format. 
• Keyboard navigation is partially supported; we are aware of keyboard traps across a number of areas.
• Using a screen reader to access text is partially supported.
• We support skip-to-content links and similar section links, such as back-to-top, only partially.

Testing was completed by the accessibility team at www.abilitynet.org.uk during March and June 2025 using manual testing across sections of the platform, covering screen reader accessibility, keyboard only use, colour contrast, colour-blindess accessibility and other criteria within the WCAG 2.2 standard.   

The AbilityNet team employed Firefox with NVDA screen reader and an iOS 18 device with VoiceOver, as well as keyboard and supplemental techniques and manual inspection of Accessibility API output.

The Social History Archive comprises more than 2,700 different datasets with over 375 million digitised images of original records and 3.5 billion transcriptions and indexes. Plus, you’ll find more than 40 million newspaper pages from over 1,000 different publications. This enormous digital archive has been created over decades in partnership with many of the world’s leading record repositories and publishers.

We have employed automation techniques to create this vast digital archive of documents using a range of scanning and Optical Character Recognition software to produce digitised images or PDFs.

A large proportion of these documents cause exceptions.  As technology evolves, we will continue to review and make efforts to remediate where feasible. 

For example: 

• OCR’d text from Newspapers is of variable quality due to the underlying source condition of the original paper document, limits in OCR technology and does not include structure metadata or tagging.
• PDFs do not have accessible text to support them.
• Elements of the Newspaper viewer and other interactive features are not yet accessible to keyboard and screen reader users, for example the Newspaper image tools for adjusting contrast or saturation and are not available to the keyboard.

• Keyboard traps removed from primary navigation at the top of screen.
• Back-to-top links made more consistent and removed associated keyboard traps.
• Keyboard focus visual feedback improved and produced more consistently.
• Skip-to-content made more consistent across larger areas of the platform.