Government regulations have come into force requiring that all public sector websites and apps meet accessibility standards.
To make sure we meet these regulations you need to review your content and make any necessary changes. Here you'll find information on how you need to create content going forward that meets the regulations.
Alt text (alternative text) or ‘alt tags’ are used to describe the appearance and function of an image on a webpage.
If you're a University web author, it’s important you include a description of the image in the ‘Alt’ field in Sitecore when you upload an image to the Media Library.
Descriptive links give users information about where a link will take them. Descriptive links are important because:
The following link text doesn’t provide any information about where the link goes and must be avoided:
Find out more about descriptive links.
Headings are used to indicate the start of a piece of content. They also provide a way for the user to scan through all the content on the page in order to find what they’re looking for. Similar to descriptive links, users of screen readers may use headings to get an overview of the content or to navigate it.
Headings provide a hierarchical structure for the content and communicate the relationship between different pieces of content. They indicate which information is most important and which content is a subset of another.
Visual indicators such as colour, size, and orientation help communicate that structure to those without visual impairment, but a screen reader has to use the heading levels to provide the structure.
It is therefore very important that you make sure your headings are ‘nested’ in numerical order, eg. heading 2, heading 3, heading 4.
If you're a web author using Sitecore, you can easily create headings using the style format drop down menu in paragraph module text editor box.
To make audio and videos accessible to all, we need to make sure that either captions (video) or transcripts (audio) are added. It’s important you discuss accessibility requirements with whoever is creating your video and audio content.
You will need to provide captions for video (transcript is optional) and transcripts for audio. Captions and transcripts are required to meet the Public Sector Accessibility Regulations 2018 and WCAG 2.0 level AA.
The process for providing transcripts is basically:
Further information can be found at W3C Web Accessibility Initiative: Transcripts
We all need to make sure that any documents that go onto the website are accessible. This is a legal requirement.
Just like creating and editing a web page, when you or colleagues create a pdf you need to think about:
Find out more about meeting our accessibility requirements and how to create accessible documents.
We have a wide range of branded accessible templates which provide you with maximum flexibility, so that you can communicate effectively with your audience and be accessibility compliant.