When we talk about health and safety software for schools, the conversation usually turns to features: how quickly an incident can be logged, how cleanly the data flows to safeguarding teams, how much administrative time a school saves.
Those things matter. But there is a question that sits underneath all of them, and it rarely gets asked: can every member of staff actually use the system in the first place?
That question is the heart of accessibility, and it is one we have been working on deliberately at Medical Tracker.
Accessibility means designing and building a product so that everyone can use it, regardless of how they see, hear, move, or process information. It is not a checklist to tick, and it is not an optional extra bolted on at the end. It is the baseline expectation that a product works for the full range of people who need it.
In practice, that covers questions such as: can a colleague who does not use a mouse navigate the whole system with a keyboard? Will a screen reader correctly announce what a button does? Is there enough colour contrast for someone with low vision to read a form? Does the page still work when it is zoomed to 200 percent? Are error messages clear enough for someone with a cognitive disability to understand what has gone wrong? When the answer to those questions is yes, the software is simply better, for everyone.
The scale is larger than many people realise. One in four people in the UK, around 16.8 million, have a disability, and 5.6 million disabled people were in employment in the second quarter of 2024. A meaningful share of the staff opening Medical Tracker every day will have a disability or a health condition, whether visible or not.
An inaccessible interface in that moment is not a minor inconvenience; it can mean a missed detail, a documentation error, or a delay in care.
This has real consequences in a school setting. The people using our system are often recording a child's injury or medical need under time pressure, sometimes with a queue of pupils waiting. An inaccessible interface in that moment is not a minor inconvenience; it can mean a missed detail, a documentation error, or a delay in care.
Accessible design reduces cognitive load and helps prevent exactly the kind of mistakes none of us can afford. There is a simpler point too: research suggests that around 70 percent of users with disabilities will abandon a website they find difficult to use. If a member of staff cannot complete a form, they cannot do their job, and the duty of care that sits behind it starts to slip.
For school and trust leaders, accessibility is not only good practice; it is increasingly a matter of compliance. The Equality Act 2010 applies across all sectors and requires reasonable adjustments, including digital ones. The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 apply to schools, and the recognised benchmark, WCAG 2.2 Level AA, is the minimum standard set out by the Department for Education for digital services.
Content should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. It is a sensible bar, and yet only 68 percent of public sector websites achieved even partial compliance in 2024.
WCAG 2.2 Level AA rests on four straightforward principles. Content should be perceivable (it can be seen or heard), operable (it works with a keyboard, a mouse, or assistive technology), understandable (clear labels and predictable behaviour), and robust (it works reliably across different browsers and screen readers). It is a sensible bar, and yet only 68 percent of public sector websites achieved even partial compliance in 2024. That gap is precisely why we believe the suppliers schools rely on should be holding themselves to a higher standard.
We are not claiming to have finished; accessibility is a journey, and we want to be honest about where we are on it. But we have made deliberate progress.
We are standardising components through a shared design system so accessibility is built in from the start rather than retro-fitted.
Our accessibility work is led from within our development team by a CPACC-certified specialist, a qualification Medical Tracker was glad to fund. On the product itself, required fields are now visually distinct across inputs, selects, date pickers, and toggles, so it is clear what a form needs before it is submitted. We have replaced hard-coded colours with design tokens, giving consistent, properly contrasting colours across the system, and we are standardising components through a shared design system so accessibility is built in from the start rather than retro-fitted. We are also upgrading older libraries that lacked the accessibility features modern ones provide.
Our newest area, the Trust Overview, shows where we are heading. There, body text and labels meet a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1, every interactive element we can reach is reachable by keyboard alone, and form fields are labelled with visible text and programmatically associated with their inputs so screen readers describe them accurately. We test all of this with a combination of automated tools (including WAVE, Lighthouse, Accessibility Insights, and axe DevTools) and manual checks such as keyboard-only navigation, screen reader testing, and zoom and reflow to 200 percent. No single tool catches more than a fraction of the issues, which is exactly why the manual work matters.
There is more to do. Bringing our older pages up to the same standard will take time, and we would rather be straightforward about that than over-promise. We are actively working towards full WCAG 2.2 Level AA alignment across the product, and we will be publishing an accessibility statement so that our commitment, and how to reach us about it, is there in the open.
This is the part worth holding on to. When we make Medical Tracker work for people with disabilities, we make it work better for everyone: faster workflows for experienced users, fewer errors for all staff, and a system that does not get in the way of the job. Schools carry a genuine duty of care, and the tools they trust to support it should carry that same duty. In a landscape where most software still falls short, we think schools deserve better, and we intend to keep proving it.