Ten top tips for designing an accessible council website

[extract] There are two things in my work life that I am passionate about – website accessibility and building effective council websites. So I thought I’d write a blog post that combines both of these passions, particularly as I believe that website accessibility is fundamental to building an effective website. This blog post is aimed at digital professionals in local government but what it covers is relevant to anybody who is building or has responsibility for managing a website.

 

Why do council websites need to meet accessibility guidelines?

Nobody should be excluded from accessing services online. To do so would represent a breach of the Equality Act 2010.

All government websites, whether built for central or local government, need to meet or exceed level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. These guidelines explain how to make websites accessible for people with disabilities...more (http://colinstenning.com/category/council-websites/accessibility/)

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A very useful and well written page by Colin Stenning covering the key needs and how to achieve an accessible website. Focus is web accessibility in local gov. but the points apply equally for all.

We have found one of the key directions to take is to improve supplier management – your point Colin in relation to ensure part of procurement is essential, the builder / service providers should not really be the one ‘signing off’ their own work. Services such as Sitemorse offer an independent assessment in so removing confusion, conflict or doubt.

All this said there are 10 sites in Local Gov. that fail both A and AA on every page, for the full results including a site by site breakdown the most recent INDEX results are available at https://sitemorse.com/index/report-statistics.html?rt=1191 (click 'accessibility rankings'). As always we are not saying automation is the only answer.

We would also stress being realistic setting achieved expectations, especially for those just taking over a site. Why not look at the top 25 pages entry and visited pages' on your site, assess these initially and focus efforts on correction here and of course review and make certain the accessibility page is full complaint.