Building accessible services
Government services must be accessible to everyone. This includes anyone with a visual, hearing, speech, motor, learning or cognitive impairment. This also includes anyone with a temporary or situational disability, such as a person with a broken arm or working in a loud environment.
Building a service with accessibility in mind not only allows those with access needs to use your service, it also improves the service for everyone else. An accessibility problem with a website can be something that affects everyone, not just people who can only access the web with a keyboard or screen reader.
Government services are legally required to be accessible. This means services must comply with the international WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standard. This requirement applies to all new and existing public sector websites and mobile applications.
Further reading:
- legal accessibility requirements for government services
- the equality act
- understanding WCAG 2.2
- accessibility checklist for your web content
How to make your service accessible
When looking to make a service accessible, the GOV.UK Service Manual’s general guidance on testing for accessibility is a great introductory resource.
Undertaking an accessibility audit
You can use a contract with the Digital Accessibility Centre to test and audit your service for accessibility.
Contact the Digital Front Door team to use this contract.
Use the GOV.UK Design System
The GOV.UK Design System is a collection of website styles, components and patterns designed to be used to build government services. It provides pre-built website markup that has been developed specifically to be accessible. Using it will also save development time and provide a look and feel consistent with other government services.
While it may not have a full set of components for every service, it provides a solid foundation to work from that can be expanded to suit a service’s individual needs.
You can also use the GOV.UK Prototype Kit to create working prototypes, share ideas with people and conduct user research.