Accessibility Director, Zara Gemmell, explains as briefly as possible, the process of carrying out an accessibility audit for our public sector clients.
We are less than a month away from the Public Sector accessibility deadline.
You must, as a minimum, have an accessibility statement in place, on your website. Your accessibility statement should show that you have carried out a full website accessibility audit in order to provide your users with details about the features and functions that are not accessible. This must be version controlled in order to show progress and provide details of your intentions to improve the accessibility of your service.
A quick explanation on the accessibility auditing process that we carry out for our clients.
We typically run a full automated scan of your site to outline template issues. Automated scanning will only detect approximately 30% of the accessibility errors on your website.
We then work with you to identify your key customer journeys and high traffic pages. We perform a manual review using assistive technology (keyboard only, screen reader, voice activation) and perform a content review for readability. Finally, we perform a technical review looking at the codebase to identify HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) semantic errors and use of ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application).
We produce a report of our findings which will be written in plain English with screen shots of where the errors have occurred and provide links to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for further guidance.
Once the report is produced, we hand it over via an online conference call and provide an assistive technology demonstration so that you can see for yourself why your users struggle with your service.
If you are looking for an audit and the agency quoting cannot demonstrate using assistive technology – It is highly likely they are not able to adequately audit your website and will not understand how to build an accessible website!
We can then create an accessibility statement to GOV.UK standards.
Fixing errors and maintaining accessibility on your website
If you need support to fix the problems that we find, we offer a number of support options and can work with you on a project or monthly basis to create and work through a roadmap of changes.
We also work in very close partnership with Shaw Trust Accessibility Services who can perform disabled user testing and provide an accreditation certificate. Once you have reached the correct standard, we can also help you monitor and keep on top of your accessible status with a subscription package to maintain your accessible accreditation.
All in all, we have everything you need to make sure your service is accessible and inclusive to all of your service users.
We can also help to up-skill your in-house team with some accessibility training if you’d really like to get ahead of the game and provide people with the skills to make a real change to the future of the world wide web.
There is a better way for an inclusive future – we can help! Get in touch!
Read the rest of Zara’s blog series
Zara explains: Accessibility Audit Training and the Value of Up-Skilling Your Team
Zara explains our training and the value you can get out of up-skilling your internal…
