Accessibility at Beat It

Beat It helps people challenge parking tickets and fines in the UK and Ireland. This statement covers the Beat It website at usebeatit.com and the Beat It app for iPhone and Android.

We want everyone to be able to fight an unfair ticket, whatever their disability. This page sets out honestly where we are — including the parts that are not good enough yet.

If any part of this is difficult for you, we will do it for you

Email support@usebeatit.com and tell us what happened. You do not need to use the app, take a photo, or fill in any form. Give us whatever you have — the ticket number, who issued it, the date, your registration, and what happened in your own words — and we will prepare the challenge for you. Where the authority accepts email, we send it. Where they insist on their own online form, we fill it in and send you the finished wording to paste, and where only post is accepted we send you a ready-to-print letter.

You do not have to explain why you need this, and it costs no more than doing it yourself.

We aim to reply within five working days. If your deadline is sooner than that, say so in the subject line and we will treat it as urgent.

What we have done

• You never have to photograph your ticket. Every place we ask for a photo also offers "Enter details manually instead", and separately "Can't use the camera? Email us and we'll do it for you". Both are on the screen from the start — you do not have to fail at the photo first to find them.
• Buttons and form fields on the sign-up, sign-in, country and ticket screens carry proper labels, so a screen reader announces what they are rather than reading them as unlabelled buttons.
• You can use the website instead of the app, or the app instead of the website. A challenge started on one can be finished on the other.
• We do not use timed steps.Nothing expires while you are filling it in. Deadlines shown to you are your council's or the operator's, not ours.
• We write in plain English. Appeal letters are written for you, so you do not have to compose legal wording yourself.

What is not good enough yet — and what we are doing about it

We are honest about this rather than quiet about it.

• We have not yet completed an end-to-end test with VoiceOver or TalkBack. We have checked that our screens expose the right labels to assistive technology, but that is not the same as a blind person completing a real challenge start to finish. Until we have done that test, we cannot promise the whole journey works. The email route above exists precisely for this.
• We do not claim to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. That is the standard we are working towards and the one we measure ourselves against. We have not been independently audited against it and we are not going to imply otherwise.
• Photographing a ticket is the one step that needs sight. We cannot change that, which is why the manual and email routes exist.
• Some parts of the app were built before we started labelling screens properly, so coverage is not yet even across every screen.

Telling us something is wrong

If you hit something you cannot use, email support@usebeatit.com and say what you were trying to do and what got in the way. It helps if you mention the device and the assistive technology you use, but tell us either way.

We will reply, tell you what we can do and by when, and — in the meantime — do the thing you were trying to do for you.

The legal bit, briefly

We are a small business and this statement is not a legal notice. Under the Equality Act 2010 we have a duty to make reasonable adjustments for disabled customers, and that duty applies whether or not anyone has asked us to. If you think we have not met it, tell us first — we would rather fix it — but you are entitled to take it further, and nothing on this page limits any right you have.