This statement covers the website hosted at www.pct.bike.
This website is run by the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Westminster. See the about page for details.
The web tool was developed in close collaboration with the DfT, to support delivery of the Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Strategy (CWIS): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cycling-and-walking-investment-strategy
We held multiple stakeholder workshops which led to improvements in the user interface. The tool is map based because it displays geographical information and therefore relies on a map.
The main target audience is professional transport planners working for local authorities, so a level of technical knowledge is assumed when using the tool - we assume users have a PC, for example, although the tool can also work on tablets to some extent.
Users can zoom-in to 300% on the main landing page and on the ‘regions’ pages such as https://www.pct.bike/m/?r=west-yorkshire . At this high zoom level, the drop-down levels spill off the screen on some screens.
We use the Leaflet.js library which allows panning and zooming using standard keystrokes such as Ctl++ for zooming in. However, there are known issues around keyboard navigation and interaction with of popups in Leaflet maps that would require upstream development work on a third party library. The text of the landing page is available as HTML. There are text summaries for the regions. None of the site has been tested with a screen reader.
We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand with use of headings.
This website is not compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard. The non-compliances are listed below:
Our maps are intended for transport planning, not for navigational purposes, and thus are exempt.
We do not have the resources to provide phone or in-person contact details.
There is a contact email at the bottom of the About page: pct@pct.bike.
We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website, subject to future funding. If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact: pct@pct.bike.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
The PCT team is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
We’ve assessed the resources required for fixing the issues with navigation and accessing information, and with interactive tools and transactions. It would require substantial input from an experienced developer, beyond the resources we have available in the current contract, to improve the accessibility of the site in the following key areas:
We believe that doing so now would be a disproportionate burden within the meaning of the accessibility regulations. We will make another assessment if and when the supplier contract is renewed (as of 2022, basic maintenance of the PCT is being funded through discretionary academic funds and not the DfT).
The PDFs and Word documents, including the user manuals, are not essential to providing our services of informing evidence-based investment in cycling. The provision of regional summaries provide an overview of the findings. The case study PDFs provide a good overview of how the services are used in practice but are not essential.
We do not plan to add captions to the video on the landing page because video recorded before September 2020 is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.
Subject to future funding we plan to provide a downloadable report as HTML/Word/PDF, providing a summary of the tool, it’s key findings.
We would also like to make the regional summary findings more accessible, as a sitemap. Reproducing the functionality of the map using text-based user interfaces would be a larger challenge, requiring a fundamental change to the codebase. It may be more cost effective to address this issue by creating new web services than by adapting the current PCT codebases, which is based on the web framework shiny.
This statement was prepared on 21 October 2020. It was last reviewed on 03 March 2022.
This website was last tested on 03 March 2022. The test was carried out by members of our research team.
We used this approach to deciding on a sample of pages to test: we clicked on the interactive tabs of the map-based interface, and tested interactive functions and downloads for the region of Avon. We downloaded one user manual and one case study.