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Helping people to use your service
Services on GOV.UK are for the benefit of all UK citizens. This means you must build a service that’s as inclusive as possible.
If you exclude anyone from using your service based on disability, you may be in breach of the Equality Act 2010.
You must also operate your service in line with your department’s Welsh Language Scheme if there is one.
You must build an accessible service as part of meeting these points:
You’ll have to explain how you did this in your service assessments.
As a minimum, your service must meet Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
You can find some accessibility issues by running an automated tool against your site and by doing regular manual checks.
You can use an automated tool to regularly test your service’s accessibility while you build it and after you launch, for example:
You must not solely rely on using automated tools to check accessibility - they can only find 20% to 30% of issues.
To find out about other automated tools, or manual tools, check W3C’s list of tools.
You must get your service tested for technical accessibility by an accessibility specialist.
If there isn’t an accessibility specialist in your team or department, you can find an accessibility agency on the Digital Marketplace.
You should get a specialist to review your service as early as possible. They can advise you on content, designs, prototypes and code and identify barriers that could affect people with disabilities, including visual, hearing, cognitive and motor impairments.
The later you find problems, the more likely it’ll be that they’re expensive or difficult to fix.
You must get a full audit done by a specialist before your service goes in front of the public to confirm it meets WCAG 2.0 to level AA.
Allow enough time between the full audit and your service launching to the public to fix any problems the specialist finds.
Your service shouldn’t go public if there are known issues that exclude some users.
You must test your service with disabled people, older people and people who use assistive technologies. Try to pick people that are likely to use your service, rather than people who do accessibility testing as their job.
Do this as part of your user research - try to include at least one person with accessibility needs in each session.
If you can’t do this testing yourself you should get an external company to do it for you. Have them test at least twice while you’re building your service.
Your service must work for people who use recent versions of these screen readers:
Your service must also work for people using screen magnifiers like:
You must make your service work with speech recognition software including Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Accessibility is more than checking the boxes of standards compliance. When writing content, consider what information would be useful to people with accessibility needs.
For example, in a ‘find my nearest’ service, consider user needs like:
You must make sure all content is written in plain English and that you follow the GOV.UK style guide.
HTML is quicker, easier and more widely usable and accessible than PDF, but if you have no other option than PDF, use this PDF guidance.
Find out more about choosing appropriate formats.
You should also make sure the non-digital parts of your service are accessible.
Some people may still need to use the phone to complete your service, for example:
If this is the case, you must make sure people who are deaf or have speech impairments can still contact you, either by SMS, email or face to face (for example with a British Sign Language translator or a lip-reader).
If you must send out letters as part of your service, eg for legal reasons, make sure you’re prepared to create alternative formats that are accessible for those that need them, for example large print, braille or audio CD.
Read about how the Government Digital Service (GDS) did accessibility testing on GOV.UK in this blog post.
Guidance first published
GOV.UK