Don’t forget about accessibility

But are you?

Have you thought about the breadth of people you are appealing to? The web, like the world at large, should be inclusive. A person should not visit your website and feel excluded for any reason. Accessibility is key.

But, what does this mean?

At its most basic level, your website should be legible both in terms of the font you use the content you display and the colour ways you’ve chosen. Everything should be clear and provide a good level of contrast. Content shouldn’t be needlessly long or complicated. Sentences should be concise and content shouldn’t move unexpectedly. The focus here is comprehension and legibility.

Navigation is next. This should be consistent and contain clear and simple cues as to where the user needs to go next. Images should contain text alternatives and pages should re-size properly.

Simplicity speaks volumes.

But this isn’t a nice to have. This is the law for Public Sector websites. In 2019, The Government set out the need for a digital service to meet the AA level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCACG 2.1)

To meet government accessibility requirements, digital services must:

• meet level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) as a minimum
• work on the most commonly used assistive technologies - including screen magnifiers, screen readers and speech recognition tools
• include people with disabilities in user research
• have an accompanying accessibility page that explains how accessible the service is.

If this all feels like a minefield, call us. We’d love to help.