Colehill Council Website

Project

Accessibility Upgrade

New rules ensuring public sector websites are fully accessible to those using assistive technologies came into force in September 2020.

Making a website accessible means making sure it can be used as widely and easily as possible including those with impaired vision, motor difficulties, cognitive impairments and hearing difficulties. At least 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability. And many more have a temporary disability.

Colehill Parish Council first contacted us about the rule changes in July 2019, so we were able to organise in plenty of time and establish a project plan in time for the national deadline.

The solution was to build a new WordPress theme built entirely with accessibility in mind. The award winning gov.uk site is full of examples of best practice and makes for an excellent model to follow.

We carried out an extensive audit of the existing content and used the Deque aXe tool and NVDA screen reader to test and ensure compliance in every area, paying special attention to:

• Colour Contrast
• Navigation & menu systems
• Breadcrumbs
• Search
• Forms
• Headers – Semantic Structure
• Numbers & Bullets
• Links
• Magnification
• Accessible Sitemaps
• Keyboad-only navigation
• Images & Video

Of course, a part of remaining compliant with the legislation is ensuring content editors amongst the council’s staff and stakeholders were aware of the new rules. We worked with staff on training, documentation and answering their questions in the days that followed the new website’s go live date.

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