Built to be read by everyone.

The standard we aim at

We are working to WCAG 2.2 level AA, the international standard that UK government departments have to meet. Seam is a private company, so the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 do not apply to us. We hold ourselves to the same line anyway, because most of the people using this site work somewhere that does.

We do not claim to meet it in full. The list further down says where we fall short.

What this page covers

The site now comes in three parts, and they are not all at the same standard.

• The public pages — home, platform, pricing, briefings, contact, and everything our data platform holds. These have been audited and are the subject of most of this page.
• The briefing itself — the weekly email, and the PDF that goes with it.
• The logged-in platform — Intelligence, Engagement and Impact. This is still being built and has not yet had a full audit. When it has, this page will say so and the date will move.

What should work

By keyboard alone. Every menu, filter, table control, price tile and link can be reached with Tab and used with Enter or Space. The four tabs on the home page and the price tiles on the pricing page also move with the arrow keys, the way a set of radio buttons does. Each page starts with a "skip to content" link, and each filter panel has a "skip to results" link, so you do not have to walk the whole menu on every visit. The link you have your finger on always shows a visible outline.

With a screen reader. Pages have one real heading structure rather than text made to look like headings. Every button and icon has a name. Filter buttons and the chips on the contact form say whether they are on or off. When a search changes the results, the new count is announced without you having to go looking for it. Tables carry a caption and proper row and column headers.

At your own contrast. We measure text against the background it actually sits on rather than guessing, and the site clears the 4.5:1 ratio the standard asks for. If you use your operating system's high contrast mode, the site redraws its menus, tables, filters, price tiles and bar charts in your colours instead of ours, so nothing that was being said in lime green alone gets lost.

Without motion. If your device is set to reduce motion, the animations stop — including the four-panel display on the home page, which then sits still until you move it yourself. If you have not asked for that, the display advances on its own every few seconds, and there is a pause button beside it that stops it for as long as you want. Pressing one of the four tabs stops it too.

Zoomed in, or in a narrow window. We have now measured this. Every public page reflows down to a 320 pixel window and holds at 200% browser zoom without forcing you to scroll sideways to read a line of text.

What does not work yet

Being straight about this is more useful than a clean bill of health. Each of these is something we have found and not yet fixed.

• Some type is small. Labels, counts and captions sit at 12px. That is legible but tight, and we would rather it were bigger. It scales if you raise your browser's text size.
• The price comparison table scrolls sideways on a phone. Nine columns will not fold into 320 pixels. The table scrolls inside its own box rather than dragging the page with it, which is allowed, but a list would read better and we intend to build one.
• Custom text spacing is close but not clean. If you override line height and letter spacing in your browser, the home page and the privacy notice pick up a few pixels of sideways scroll at phone width. Nothing is hidden or clipped; it is untidy rather than unusable.
• Choice groups announce as buttons, not as choices. On the contact form, "Stage" and "Where?" let you pick one answer out of several. A screen reader reads them as a row of on/off buttons rather than as one question with one answer. It works; it just says less than it should.
• The briefing PDF is untagged. The weekly email is plain HTML and reads fine. The PDF attached to it has not been given the internal structure a screen reader needs. The email is the better version until we fix it.
• Payment happens somewhere else. Card details go to Stripe, on Stripe's own checkout page. We do not control it and cannot fix it. Stripe publishes its own accessibility position; if the checkout defeats you, email us and we will take the payment another way.
• Source documents are not ours. Everything we hold links out to GOV.UK, Parliament, the National Audit Office and others. We cannot fix the accessibility of a document we did not write, and some of the older PDFs behind those links are poor.
• Some pictures are only pictures. The sector circles and the four-layer diagram are drawn to be looked at. The rank, the count and the name are written out in text beside them, so nothing is carried by the picture alone — but the picture itself will not tell you anything.

How this was tested

On 15 September 2026, three ways at once.

By machine. Every public page run through axe-core, the open-source checker behind most accessibility tools, against the full WCAG 2.2 AA rule set. Two real contrast failures came out of it and both were fixed the same day: the lime "Get a briefing" button was rendering pale text on pale green on the darker pages, at a ratio of 1.2:1 where 4.5:1 is the floor.

By measurement. Every page rendered at 320 pixels wide, at 200% zoom, and again with line height, letter spacing and word spacing forced to the values the standard names, checking each time for sideways scroll and for text clipped out of its box. Then rendered again in Windows high contrast mode to find anything whose meaning was being carried by colour alone.

By hand. Heading structure, landmarks, form labels, button names and table markup read out of the live pages; keyboard order walked through the menu, the filter panel, the price tiles and the contact form.

Automated checkers were not relied on alone. They are good at finding a missing label and blind to a table that reads as nonsense.

We have not yet had the site tested by disabled users. That is the next thing worth doing, and the thing this page cannot substitute for.

Telling us something is wrong

Email [email protected]. Say which page, and what happened — "the year filter on the procurement page cannot be reached with a keyboard" is worth more than a standard number. We answer within five working days, and we will tell you plainly whether we can fix it and when.

If you need something on this site in another format — a source as a plain spreadsheet, a briefing as large print — ask, and we will send it.

How this page is kept honest

It is dated, and the list above is a real list rather than a form of words. When we fix one of those items we take it off; when we find a new one we add it, whether or not anyone has complained. If this page has not moved in a year, assume it has stopped being true and email us.