Accessibility

We aim to meet WCAG 2.2 at level AA across everything we publish: this website, the parent console, the phone app, and the parts of the Windows agent a person actually reads — the block page, the tray menu and the transparency screen.

We are a private company selling to households, so the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 do not apply to us, and we are not going to claim conformance with a regime we are not in. The Equality Act 2010 does apply, and so does the ordinary proposition that a product about protecting children should be usable by the adults responsible for them.

These are the things a person can check for themselves rather than take our word for.

• Text is text. Nothing on this site is an image of words. Every heading, table and list is marked up as what it is, so a screen reader announces a table as a table and a heading as a heading.
• There are real landmarks. A banner, a single main region, navigation and a footer, plus a skip link as the first thing a keyboard reaches. The illustrations of the product are drawn as inline graphics with text alternatives, not screenshots.
• Colour is never the only signal. Where something has a state — blocked or allowed, included or excluded, defended or not defended — the state is written in words as well. That rule is enforced in the data the site is built from, not applied afterwards.
• Everything works from the keyboard. There are no keyboard traps, focus is always visible as a solid three-pixel outline, and wide tables are focusable so they can be scrolled without a mouse.
• It reflows. Text can be enlarged to 200% and the page reflows to a 320-pixel-wide window without a horizontal scrollbar. Wide tables scroll inside their own region rather than pushing the page sideways.
• Nothing is timed. No session expires while you read, no carousel moves on without you, and nothing disappears after a few seconds.
• The measure is short. Running text is held to roughly sixty-five characters a line, which matters for dyslexic readers and for anybody reading on a phone at the end of a shift.
• These documents print. There is a print stylesheet, because a carer may need the Children’s Code page on paper for somebody who will not read a link.

• No independent audit. Of the website, the console, the app or the agent.
• No systematic assistive-technology testing. We have not worked through the product with a range of screen readers, magnifiers, switch access and voice control on a defined matrix, and until we have, we will not claim to have.
• No testing with disabled users. The onboarding is validated with non-technical testers before release; that is not the same thing and we are not going to let it stand in for it.
• The exported PDFs. Generated documents are the surface most likely to fall short, and we have not verified their tagging.
• The Windows agent’s own dialogs. The installer and the uninstall prompt follow Windows conventions but have not been assessed against WCAG.

If something on this site, in the console, in the app or on the PC stops you doing what you came to do, write to support@pcguardian.co.uk and tell us what happened. Put “accessibility” in the subject line.

Under the Equality Act 2010 we have a duty to make reasonable adjustments so that a disabled person is not put at a substantial disadvantage. If you think we have not, tell us, and if you are not satisfied with our answer you can get free, independent advice from the Equality Advisory and Support Service.

If your concern is about how we handle personal data rather than about access, the route is in the privacy notice and ends with the Information Commissioner’s Office.

This statement was prepared on 16/08/2026. It is reviewed when the site changes materially, and at least once a year. When an independent audit is carried out, this page will say who did it, when, and what they found — including the parts they failed us on.