Online accessibility

I work for a London council, and we know that nearly a quarter of our online audience (the borough's residents) have a disability. Permanent (such as low vision), temporary (such as a broken arm), visible (such as blind person), and non visible (such as dyslexia).

Websites
Some of our users may use technology when using our websites.
A person with low vision may use a screen reader.
A person with a broken arm may not be able to use a mouse, so relies on a keyboard to navigate a website.
We therefore need to make sure our websites work with this technology.

One thing that really annoys me about websites - including this one - is seeing click here or read more. Links need to be descriptive because those using a screen reader can navigate via links. This means if they land on a ‘read more’ but haven’t read the content beforehand, they’ll have no idea what they’ll be reading more about!

Content
The average reading age is 9. We need to make sure the content on our web pages is in simple language. It is also important to keep sentences and paragraphs short, and break up sections with headings. Screen readers can navigate through content if heading styles have been used, but the layout of a page is improved for everyone at the same time. All images need alt text, which is a description of the image - you may have seen images described on social media. Tables have to be created a certain way, and colour contrast has to be strong. Patterns are useful in graphs and charts - think of people who are colour blind - they may not be able to tell there’s a difference, but patterns can help.

Documents
We have thousands of documents online (PDFs). We know that over 60% of our residents use a mobile phone to view our website. This means that documents are being read on a tiny screen - not a great experience for anyone! We are therefore advising our services to create web pages rather than documents, wherever possible, since they are much more user friendly. However, where a document is essential, it has to work with the technology already mentioned, so they have to be set up accessibly.

I've been training staff to create better documents in Word over the last few months. What I teach gives staff the knowledge on how to make their formatting more consistent and easier to use, create table of contents automatically, but also instruct them on how to make a table readable by a screen reader for instance.

I’ve also been managing a review of all documents, to identify ones that can be deleted - this speeds up our search results. I’ve deleted 3,500 so far. But 4,500 remain.

Summary
I’ve tried not to go into too much detail, but hopefully this gives a broad understanding of what I’m working on. I think it’s really important to make sure everyone can use our sites. It’s also a legal requirement!

I’ve become rather passionate about online accessibility. It’s like if you go to a restaurant and the only free tables are upstairs, but there’s no lift and you can’t climb stairs, you won’t be getting dinner at that restaurant.
It’s the same with online accessibility: a website doesn’t work with a screen reader, or the content is so confusing that questions remain unanswered. OK, they may still get their dinner, but they won’t be getting the information they need!