Why provide an accessibility statement

Accessibility statements are important for several reasons:

• Show your users that you care about accessibility and about them
• Provide them with information about the accessibility of your content
• Demonstrate commitment to accessibility, and to social responsibility

As a local council you will be required to provide an accessibility statement on your website

What to include in an accessibility statement

Accessibility statements should contain at least the following:

• A commitment to accessibility for people with disabilities
• The accessibility standard applied, such as WCAG 2.1
• Contact information in case users encounter problems

It is also advisable to include the following information:

• Any known limitations, to avoid frustration of your users
• Measures taken by your organisation to ensure accessibility
• Technical prerequisites, such as supported web browsers
• Environments in which the content has been tested to work
• References to applicable national or local laws and policies

How to write an accessibility statement

Accessibility statements are primarily for users of your content. Usually they will refer to accessibility statements when they encounter problems. Technical and jurisdictional language will likely lead to confusion and increase the frustration rather than help your users. It is important to write in simple language, and to provide information that is useful to the users, rather than use the language of developers and lawyers.

In particular, accessibility statements should explain functionality and known limitations in common terms. For example, rather than to say “WCAG Success Criterion 1.2.2 was not met”, it is better to say “videos do not have captions”. Accessibility statements are not technical assessments or declarations of conformity, though they ideally refer to such background to provide verification and increase credibility.

Where to put an accessibility statement

Accessibility statements should be easy to find. Linking them to the footer of your website is an acknowledged convention, but you could include links to them from other areas from your site.

Sample accessibility statement

You can view a sample accessibility statement on the Government website here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sample-accessibility-statement/sample-accessibility-statement-for-a-fictional-public-sector-website

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) outline what you need to do to improve the accessibility of your Town, Parish or Community Council website. This involves considering how the users with the following impairments can access your information:

• Vision – including people who are blind, partially sighted or colour blind
• Mobility – including users who find it difficult to use a mouse or keyboard
• Thinking and understanding – including people with dyslexia, autism or learning difficulties
• Hearing – people who are either deaf or hard of hearing. We won’t go into this in detail as it doesn’t apply to most Town, Parish or Community Council websites, only websites that use sound or video.

Making your website accessible to users with impaired vision

This means that your website should be accessible for users who cannot see well and may need to use a screen reader that will ‘speak’ the content to them to access your site or may need to enlarge the text using a screen magnifier or increasing the text size

What you need to do:

• Provide ‘alt text’ for all non text content, for example images
• Ensure your web pages are structured logically so that they can be read by a screen reader. The best way to do this is to use the Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 options structure the sections in your web page, rather than manually setting font sizes and making them bold etc
• Use tables sparingly. If you are using tables make sure that the headers and content are defined as such and that they work when magnified to 200% and on smaller screens
• Do not use underlining other than for text links
• If you publish PDF files as so many Town, Parish or Community Councils do, make sure they are accessible – See making pdf files accessible for how to do this

What your web designer needs to do:

• Make sure that any forms, such as the contact form, have the correct markup to be read by a screen reader
• Do not just use colour to distinguish something. For example use the convention of underlining to define links and do not use underlining elsewhere
• Use default text colours that show up well against the background colour
• Ensure that every feature can still be used when viewed at 200% text size and that content flows into a single column when it’s increased by 400%
• Make sure you site is correctly programmed for screen readers
• Use valid HTML to enable assistive technologies to interpret content
• Ensure that all parts of the interface can be read by assistive technologies

Making your website accessible for users with impaired mobility

This is especially to address the needs of users with mobility impairments to ensure they can access your web content using keyboard or voice commands, rather than a mouse, to navigate through your site

What you need to do:

• Make links descriptive rather than using ‘click here’ as the link. For example use ‘click for Parish Council minutes‘ rather than ‘for Parish Council minutes click here‘ where the underlined text represents the actual link.
• Use meaningful page titles, headings and labels so that users can easily find the information they want if they are using a screen reader

What your web designer needs to do:

• Make sure everything works for users who are just using keyboards
• Ensure that using keyboards mean that users can move through the content in a logical order
• Provide a ‘skip to content’ link in the coding of the site so that screen readers do not read out all the programming commands
• Use ‘active focus’ so that users can see what their assistive technology is currently focused on
• Enable visitors to disable or change shortcut keys

Making your website accessible for users with cognitive impairments

This is to address the needs of users with thinking or understanding difficulties. You need to ensure that the language and structure of your site is easy to understand

What you need to do:

• Write in plain English, using short sentences
• Use straightforward language and simple words and explain any complicated words or phrases
• Always provide an explanation of any acronyms used

What your web designer needs to do:

• Ensure that form fields are correctly labeled and that they’re correctly coded with accessibility in mind

From 23 September 2020 information published on town, community and parish council websites must comply with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility regulations. This will cover your website content including web pages, pdf files, images and the website itself. We have published a series of guides on how to make sure that your website content is compliant.

Making web pages accessible

• Write using simple language and short sentences
• Keep pages simple
• Use ‘all capitals’ text sparingly
• Avoid using underlined text unless it is for links

Structuring your web pages for accessibility

• Avoid using tables to layout your page
• Structure your pages using headings, bullets and numbered lists. Make sure that your headings are correctly nested, where heading 3 is always a sub-heading of heading 2 and heading 4 is a sub heading of heading 3 etc. The main page heading will be heading 1, so start your heading structure with heading 2
• Make sure that your headings are correctly defined as heading 2, heading 3 and so on, rather than using text that is larger and bold. In WordPress, you can set the headings using the drop-down box at the top left of the page you are editing. It will usually be set to ‘paragraph’ unless you change it to a heading.

Making images accessible

You must ensure that any images you add to the website are accessible to visually impaired users who need to use screen readers and users with images turned off by adding an ‘Alternative text’ tag (‘alt tag’) to the image that describes what the picture shows. The alt tag will be what is shown to these visitors. How you add the alt tag will depend on what you use to make your web pages.

To add alt text in WordPress, navigate to the image in your media library and click on it to bring up the ‘Attachment Details’ screen. On the right of the screen you will see a box to add ‘Alternative text’ in the grey sidebar on the right of the screen.

Making website links (hyperlinks) accessible

Again, for users with impaired vision who are browsing your site using a screen reader it is important to make website hyperlinks descriptive, rather than using ‘click here’ as your text link. See the links in the following paragraph as a good way to show descriptive links.

Making PDF and Word files accessible

Also, you must make sure that all PDFs or other documents you put on your website are accessible. See Guide to writing documents that are accessible, Making pdf files accessible and How to save Word documents in accessible pdf-a format.

Write using simple language

Use simple language as often as is possible. This makes your document accessible to people with cognitive impairments or learning disabilities.

Most people would prefer to read documents that use simple language as it means they can quickly understand the information.

If you need to use technical terms or acronyms, explain what the mean the first time you use them.

Keep your documents simple

• Use short sentences and paragraphs
• Use a sans serif font like Arial or Helvetica. Make the minimum size 12pt.
• Avoid using ‘all capitals’ text or italics
• Left align your text, don’t justify text
• Use centred text sparingly and only where you want it to stand out such as the main heading
• Avoid underlining unless for links
• Use single columns if possible, rather than a more complicated layout
• Use tables sparingly – only for data and avoid splitting or merging cells
• Don’t use colour alone to get across the meaning
• If you use images, think about how a user with visual impairment will be able to access the information
  • by stating the same information in the text
  • by giving the image an ‘alt text’ (alternative text) tag
• Avoid footnotes if possible

Structure the document

Use bullet points, numbered lists and subheads to break up the document.

Always mark up subheadings with styles – you can create a heirarchy of headings to structure your document, using heading 1, heading 2, heading 3 etc.

Ideally publish web pages rather than PDF files

The Government guidelines state that wherever possible, information should be published as an HTML web page, rather than as a PDF file.

The reason is that information is harder to find, use and maintain in a PDF file and is more difficult to make PDF files accessible. You can read here about why content should be published in HTML and not PDF

More complex documents

There’s lots of information about how to make more complex Microsoft Office documents accessible on the Accessible Digital Office Document (ADOD) Project website.

1. Under ‘Save as type’ select PDF (*.pdf)
2. Select the checkbox for Minimum size (publishing online)
3. Click on the Options button for more options. This will launch the Options window (shown below)

1. Check the box ‘Document structure tags for accessibility.
2. Check the box PDF/A compliant