Website Accessibility

Question

Would be very interested to hear PC experiences in meeting the regulations on website accessibility that come in, in about a week from now.

Answer 1

The accessibility regulations are contained in the 'Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018'.

Basically you have to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (known as WCAG 2.1 level AA standard).

This applies to mobile phones as well as normal websites.
A bit of care is required in choosing suppliers. One that we have been looking at promises all the above, but when putting some of their example council websites through some testing routines, they failed the checks, but the provider has cunningly added a widget that more or less then meets the criteria. It's not perfect, there may be some screen readers for example that won't work, but it will probably be acceptable. It may also fail to work on older hardware / operating systems.
So we will be looking for other quotes.
However accessibility is not just about technical issues. Colour schemes are also very important so that there is a good contrast between the text and background, and the examples we looked at above failed on those grounds alone, probably because the council specified some corporate colour scheme.
Some of the best examples are government websites of course.

Comments

My council is only just implementing this. We will not comply on time

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The regulation is a little hazy on the requirements and I would think that most PC's will not be able to afford to employ a specialist company to do the work for them as stated here there are a lot of sharks out there to take advantage of the "fear factor" in all this. I remember the chaos when the disability discrimination act came in and there was countrywide panic. Common sense prevailed. I feel that many PC's don'r realise that they can follow the basic accessibility check themselves without forking out thousands of pounds of taxpayers money.

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RuralTCllr Going on past history I think it will be very unlikely that the web police will be knocking down your door on the due date and providing you have it in progress then most will be happy with the efforts.

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It's not that hazy. They came in to being in 2018. A lazy council acts last minute in my opinion.