Web accessibility essentials
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Presentation used at the Let's Talk session on 3 March 2020 to help staff understand the scope of accessibility regulations and what they can do
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Web accessibility essentials
- 1. Web accessibility Neil Lawrence Digital Development Manager
- 2. 1. Why it’s important 2. What it covers 3. What we’re doing 4. What you need to do
- 3. 1. Why it’s important
- 4. occintranet/task/web-accessibility It’s about making sure everyone can use the web
- 6. 2. What it covers
- 7. a) How websites look b) How they function c) What is hosted on them
- 8. a) How websites look
- 12. occintranet/task/web-accessibility Image Description: Oxford City Council’s zero emission zone phasing map which highlights areas in red, green, and blue. The map shows Oxford city, with a red zone in the centre and a larger green zone surrounding the red zone, and a blue hatched zone covering most of the city depicted in the image. Information about the zones is listed on the right hand side. ‘Red Zone, 2020’: ‘Road user charges for non zero emissions vehicles from late 2020’. ‘Green Zone, 2021/2022’: ‘Possible road user charges to enforce low emission and zero emission requirements from 2021/2022’. ‘Blue Zone, 2020-2025’: Most busses to by Euro 6 by December 2020; Remaining busses to be Euro 6 by December 2022; Busses to be zero emission by 2035/2037, by will work with operations to achieve this by 2030 if possible; Possible future ultra-low emissions zone for all vehicles. ‘Citywide Zone, 2020-2035’: All Oxford-licensed Hackney Carriages (black cabs) to be zero emission by 2020-2025; Possible future ultra-low emission zone for all vehicles; Citywide zero emissions zone by 2035. Image was taken from the Oxford City Council’s January 2020 Briefing note, available on the Oxford City Council’s website here: https://www.oxford.gov.uk/downloads/file/6964/zez_briefing_note_- _january_2020. Crown Copyright 2019. OS Licence 0100023343.
- 14. occintranet/task/web-accessibility How we link to things here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BA95RehVApmCXK IDMfx_4oOOyU77A1VnwuX_ryqHec/edit#slide=id.g11a2c 1da02_1_54 this blog post using the request form
- 16. occintranet/task/web-accessibility How we link to things The preliminary timeline Memorandum of understanding (Google doc) Our philosophy for usability and accessibility Request a new Moodle site
- 19. occintranet/task/web-accessibility How we use tables Department Class Number Room Number Days Start Time End Time Teacher Biology 100 5 Mon 10:00 11:00 100 5 Tue 11:00 12:30 John 205 6 Tue 09:00 10:30 Paul 315 6 Mon 13:00 14:00 George Business 150 15 Mon 09:00 10:00 Ringo
- 20. occintranet/task/web-accessibility How we use tables Department, Class Number, Room Number, Days, Start Time, End Time, Teacher, 100, 5, Mon, 10:00, 11:00, 100, 5, Tue, 11:00, 12:30, John, 205, 6, Tue, 09:00, 10:30, Paul, 315, 6, Mon, 13:00, 14:00, George, Business, 150, 15, Mon, 09:00, 10:00, Ringo
- 23. b) How websites work
- 24. • Forms with proper labels • Good error messages • Can navigate with keyboard • Moving images are controlled • Data accessed through tables
- 25. c) What is hosted on websites
- 27. 3. What we’re doing
- 28. • Accessibility audit • Improvement Plan • Intranet guidance • Small website audits • Helping fix poor content • HTML policy format
- 30. 4. What you need to do
- 31. • Use the intranet guidance • Don’t use PDFs/Word • Quote “WCAG AA 2.1” • Work with us
- 32. Thank you
Editor's Notes
- Lot of ground to cover so questions at the end if time Web accessibility covers Council websites and their content Council intranets and their content Online applications (with a web front end) and their content Mobile apps and their content
- If you take one thing away from today, make it this. We want all our customers to be able to use our websites and access our services equally easily. For all the examples that follow, think about if you created information in an obscure language that lots of people don’t understand, and then wondered why people didn’t follow your guidance The figures on disabilities in the UK show the scale of the issue 7 million people who identify as disabled 2 million blind or partially sighted people 700,000 adults and children on the autistic spectrum, of these 40% suffer from anxiety 11 million people are deaf or hard of hearing over 40% of people of 50, and over 70% of people over 70 6.3 million people (around 10% of the UK population) have dyslexia Life is hard enough for people with disabilities. We shouldn’t be making it harder to get services from the council on top of that The same applies to our own staff with disabilities – we can’t make life at work harder for them by making them use systems that are difficult to use
- Even if we didn’t think helping everyone get equal access was important, there is legislation to say we have to. Equalities Act 2010 – protected characteristics for 9 groups, including those with disabilities. New legislation came into effect in September 2018 to ensure that websites and web applications in the public sector can be used by everybody, regardless of ability, by meeting accessibility standards. The regulations have a specific provision for acting on a request for a ‘reasonable adjustment’ Failure to make a reasonable adjustment 11.—(1) A failure by a public sector body to comply with the accessibility requirement is to be treated as a failure to make a reasonable adjustment. (2) A failure by a public sector body to provide a satisfactory response to a request to provide information in an accessible format, pursuant to regulation 12(2), is to be treated as a failure to make a reasonable adjustment. (3) A “failure to make a reasonable adjustment” in this regulation means a failure to make a reasonable adjustment for the purposes of— (a)sections 20, 21 and 29 of the Equality Act 2010; or (b)sections 19 to 21 and 21B to 21E of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995(1).
- Look = the content on the page that people add, or the designs we choose Function = how the website behaves Hosted on them = non-web based things like PDFs and Word documents Quick quiz: Which of these do you think is the biggest problem for us to solve?
- This is the main area where you…..
- Colour blindness Colour contrast
- Colour blindness Colour contrast
- This is a real example from our Zero Emission Zone proposals How would someone with a screen reader interpret this image? How would it read the text – this is all on an image Leaving disabilities aside, how is anyone using a mobile phone going to see and understand this on a small screen?
- This is what would be needed to interpret it Even then it doesn’t manage to explain what the zone covers properly What do you think would work better? What about using a list of streets in each zone
- So we’re all used to adding a hyperlink to an email or in a PDF. But getting this wrong means hard work for someone else Think about how you use the web as a sighted user. Do you read every word carefully, in sequence, from top to bottom? No. Humans are lazy by design and have learned to ‘scan’ pages for interesting information as fast as possible. People that use screen readers will skip to headings and lists of links to get to what they need quickly So how does this list of links look in a screen reader?
- So not ideal Links need to give a clear idea of where they are taking people next so they know if it is what they are looking for. Best way to think is that every link needs to make sense in isolation Using ‘here’ or ‘click here’ is really common and really unhelpful The Google doc link is long and ugly!
- So here’s an improved version of the same document That link to the google doc tells the user that’s what they’ll end up seeing And how does that look in a screen reader?
- Isn’t this better? Wouldn’t you know exactly where you’re going next?
- Using headings properly is such an easy thing to do, but we often make life more difficult for ourselves as well as other people by not using them We play around with text size, bold, underlining all to make the different parts of a document we’re writing These built-in styles in Word do that work for us. The same things apply for web pages. These use built in header styles that screen readers can understand really clearly Remember we talked about how we skip around when we view web pages, and that screen reader users do the same? Headings become really important here
- Heading 1 is always for the title of a web page or document – you only use this once Heading 2 is your main topic Heading 3 is a sub-topic You may even go down to heading 4 But if you skip straight from 1 to 3 you start to confuse a screen reader
- Tables are a convenient way for us to lay out lots of information but they may cause more problems than they solve if not created properly on a web page This one looks perfectly harmless doesn’t it? I knocked this up on Excel and copy/pasted it. Easy for me, but how does that work on a web page?
- So this is how a screen reader would read out that table. Without a proper structure that a screen reader can understand it becomes gibberish Copying and pasting in tables just doesn’t work for websites. And for tables within PDFs it’s the same story – they need other information about them to work properly and
- Here’s a well formatted table for comparison. First rule is: don’t use a table unless you really need one, and then only for data not to layout text. Better still use bullet points with headings to make it easier to read Think about how easy the information you’re trying to convey will be Keep it simple – multi-column tables can be difficult even for able bodied people to read and understand. No more than 3 columns, Always define which row is the header, and use just one row, not multiple rows Start a new table if the subject changes. Don’t try and cram everything into one table as it won’t make sense Don’t copy and paste a table – use the web content system to create it
- Videos are a great way to get lots of information across, and be more engaging, but they are also a way to exclude people Some people with disabilities will find a video with lots of cuts/changes, text overlays hard to follow. Captions in videos will only work if people can see them The minimum we have to do to be compliant is include a complete transcript, which can be read by a screen reader too. That’s something we haven’t done so far. They should contain additional descriptions, explanations, or comments that may be beneficial, such as indications of laughter or an explosion. So here’s an example of Oxfordshire County Council doing this with their videos
- This section isn’t really one most staff have to worry about. That’s where my team come in But if you are commissioning someone to create a website for you, or you’re buying software that the public will use via a web browser, you need to at least know there are things that your designer needs to take account of Also, if you’re buying software that will have a website front end you need to make sure it meets the standards
- This is the non-web based content that we load
- So let’s talk about PDFs Our single biggest problem in making the web more accessible is our heavy use of PDFs, Word Docs, Excel spreadsheets We have literally thousands of these, and most of them fail the accessibility tests We have 175 ‘forms’ that are downloads for people to fill in and email to us. As mentioned earlier, this is the biggest single problem we have to fix, but there are no easy fixes as any changes can only be done manually, one-by-one.
- Got experts Shaw Trust – 11 websites and web applications Developed a plan about next steps Looking at all 25 of our smaller websites, including service ones As web content comes through the team we do what we can to fix it. Biggest problem is with large PDF documents from designers that haven’t been designed with accessibility in mind. These can take days to fix, and we just don’t have the resources to do this Also looking at
- We’ve already pulled together a batch of good practice guidance on the intranet to give you practical help in improving content going on the web. Just search for ‘accessibility’ to find it. It’s pretty comprehensive! We’ll also be introducing a deadline after which time we won’t publish any non-compliant downloads – 1 April 2019. After this time, documents will be sent back to you to fix. Again, the intranet guidance covers how you can repair non-compliant items, but the best approach is to not use them at all if you can If you have to create a PDF-based document as it will also be in print, make sure the designers you are using are told they must comply with the regulations, and they won’t get paid it they don’t. We’re looking to work with Comms and Procurement to source some designers that can be relied on to produce compliant documents. For any work you commission, start to quote this accessibility standard – if your designers don’t understand it, it’s time to get better designers! Finally, my team would much rather be asked for advice or suggestions than tell people they can’t do something. If we’re approached early on we can point people the right way or suggest alternatives, which we’re really happy to do. There’s a lot to get your head around with this and we understand that