Accessibility Statement

This site should work for you whatever you use to read it. Below is how we measure up to WCAG 2.2 AA, what still needs work, and how to tell us when something gets in your way.

It covers thecourantfund.org, run by The Courant Fund for Children (Scottish charity SC017462).

Our commitment

You should be able to:

• Get around every page with a keyboard alone.
• Read everything, and use every control, with a screen reader.
• Double the text size (up to 200%) without the page breaking.
• Read the whole site – not just the menus – in any of seven languages: English, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Polish, Ukrainian or Chinese, with Arabic, Urdu and Farsi laid out right to left. The translations are made by machine and have not been checked by a native speaker, so English remains the authoritative version.
• Use the site without a mouse.

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

Conformance status

We aim to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 Level AA. WCAG sets out how to make web content easier to use for disabled people.

Cairnstone Consultancy Ltd checked the site against those criteria during the 2026 upgrade. That was a self-assessment rather than an independent audit, so we describe the site as partially conformant with WCAG 2.2 Level AA: we believe it meets Level AA apart from the known limitations below.

Known limitations

• Donation widget (CAF Online): the donate page embeds a widget built by the Charities Aid Foundation, so its accessibility is out of our hands. It also loads its own font and analytics from Google, so the donate page fetches more from third parties than any other page on the site. If the widget gives you trouble, contact CAF at cafonline.org, or donate by post or phone instead.
• Scanned documents: any PDF we link to that was made from a scan may not read well with assistive technology. Ask us and we will send you the content another way.
• Machine translation: the whole site – including this statement, the rules about who can apply, the privacy notice and both forms – is available in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Polish, Ukrainian and Chinese, and the three right-to-left languages mirror the layout. Those translations were produced by machine and have not been checked by a native speaker. They may contain mistakes, including in the rules that decide whether you can apply for a grant. English is the authoritative version. If a translated page affects a decision that matters to you, please read the English page or contact us. Switch language and a notice on every page says this in that language.
• Fonts for non-Latin scripts: we host our own fonts for Latin text and for the Arabic script, so English, Polish, Arabic, Urdu and Farsi look the same on every device. We stopped there on purpose: a font covering every remaining script would run to several megabytes and make the site slow and far less green. Ukrainian and Chinese therefore use the fonts already on your device – Chinese in particular depends on your system having a Chinese font, as nearly all do. One more thing worth naming: our Arabic font is a Naskh face, so Urdu appears in Naskh rather than the Nastaliq style Urdu readers usually prefer. It stays perfectly legible.
• Form submission: both forms are handled by Basin, an outside service, and load a small tracking script (Ahoy) from an external network we do not control. The forms themselves work with a keyboard and a screen reader. If you cannot get one to submit, contact us and we will take your details another way.
• Completing the forms in English: applications normally reach us through an intermediary – a support worker, social worker or partner charity – and we expect the form itself to be completed in English. Translating it is still worth doing: it lets a child's family read what is being asked, and what they would be agreeing to, while the intermediary completes the form.

Feedback and contact

If something here gets in your way, tell us through the contact form. It helps if you say:

• which page or feature you were using
• what went wrong
• your browser or assistive technology, if you know it

We will reply within 5 working days, and aim to fix the problem – or find you a way round it – within 20.

Enforcement

If our answer does not satisfy you, take it to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC):

• Website: equalityhumanrights.com/en/contact-us
• Phone: 0808 800 0082 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm)

In the UK, website accessibility falls under the Equality Act 2010.

Technical specification

The site is plain HTML and CSS with a little JavaScript. It leans on:

• HTML5 semantic elements (header, nav, main, footer, section, fieldset, legend)
• WAI-ARIA attributes where HTML semantics alone are not enough
• CSS logical properties, so the layout mirrors for right-to-left reading
• self-hosted fonts – a Latin heading typeface (English and Polish) and a Naskh face for the Arabic script (Arabic, Urdu, Farsi) – on a system-font body stack. Each is split by character range, so you only download the font your language actually needs. Ukrainian and Chinese use the fonts already on your device. Our own pages request no fonts, analytics or other files from anyone else: six of our nine pages fetch nothing at all from a third party. The exceptions are the donate page, where the CAF widget loads its own font and analytics, and the apply and contact pages, which load Basin's Ahoy script – see Known limitations.

Assessment approach

Cairnstone Consultancy Ltd carried out the assessment for us: a self-evaluation against the WCAG 2.2 AA criteria, not an independent audit. Before the next significant change to the site, we would want a fuller audit – axe and Lighthouse, plus someone testing by hand with a keyboard and a screen reader.

Statement prepared

We prepared this statement on 2 July 2026, after the accessibility and multilingual upgrade.

Last reviewed 2 July 2026. We will look at it again after any significant change to the site's content or structure.