Accessibility
Accessibility guidelines
As part of meeting government accessibility requirements, services must
- achieve WCAG 2.1 level AA 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
Further advice is available from accessibility@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk
The four main design principles for WCAG 2.1 are
Perceivable – make sure users can recognise and use the service with the senses that are available to them
Operable – make sure users can find and use content, regardless of how they choose to access it (e.g. using a keyboard or voice commands)
Understandable – make sure content is understandable i.e. plain English, visible and meaningful form labels, consistency and predictable features, editable forms
Robust – content can be reliably interpreted by a wide variety of user agents i.e. outdated browsers, accessible modal dialogs and status messages
Checklist
To ensure we are meeting at a minimum WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines, we can use the checklist which has techniques for success and failure.
Code level
From a code perspective we will go through each criteria and ensure it is successfully met.
There are also tools available recommended by GDS to automate some of this. We are therefor currently using:
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