Project 549 Website Accessibility Regulations 2018

The law Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, has a deadline of September 2020 for existing websites, the very basic part of it is that all websites should have a suitable accessibility statement.

The University web estate audit is supposed to be helping track down compliant/non-compliant sites, but we should be planning on making sure all our websites are compliant, or kill the website if it is not, and will not be made so.

See: https://www.ed.ac.uk/about/website/accessibility/guidelines-policy-legislation which contains a link to: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps Other info: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/making-our-site-more-accessible/

This project will audit our web sites, and make sure they meet their legal requirements regarding accessibility.

Project being tracked at: https://computing.projects.inf.ed.ac.uk/549/

Initial Thoughts

• Generate a clear web page on what counts as a "website" (web apps are included) - WebsiteAccessibilityWhatsAffected
• What the regulations mean, how they might affect a site. - At a minimum contain an Accessibility Statement. Comply with WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)
• Are there any exceptions? - Yes see WebsiteAccessibilityWhatsAffected
• Look out for LittleForest workshops (tool being used by Uni to score sites)
• Where the boundaries lie. Who is responsible for making sure a site is compliant, doing any remedial work, etc ?
• Chrome has a developer tool - lighthouse - that gives a report for the page you are on. There are some free online checkers too - WebsiteAccessibilityCheckers

Activity

A list of all (most) of Informatics hosted sites was passed to the Informatics Communications team, they have taken on the task of contacting site/page owners to remind them off the Accessibility Regulations. Infcomms have also been helping users to make their content accessible.

Still to do

• Produce template accessibility statement
  • For exempt sites - WebAccessibilityStatementExemptTemplate
  • For current sites - WebAccessibilityStatementTemplate
• Produce a working list of sites that have and have not been looked at/updated. We need to do this in conjunction with Infcomms
• Produce our proposal for how we should record new websites to keep Infcomms updated - WebEstateRecordProposal

-- NeilBrown - 22 Jun 2020