There’s no need to be confused about digital accessibility – whatever you’re not sure about, I can help you make changes today.
I can provide access consultancy covering all aspects of digital accessibility, including reviewing your current digital, marketing and overall access strategies and working out how to build in accessibility throughout your organisation. All my recommendations will refer to WCAG 2.1, other guidelines and legislation internationally and also best practice within your sector.
As well as the access user testing, training and legal support I can offer you outlined elsewhere on the site, I can also provide other access support – let me know if you’d like to discuss anything further. Meanwhile here are some suggestions:
Review briefing, branding and style guidelines
To ensure that accessibility is built in when outsourcing work and briefing suppliers
- If you work with external agencies and suppliers, staff need to brief with the same access specifications.
- Following a recent access audit, within the accessibility statement there will be a commitment to a set of ‘rules’ and guidance that your organisation has agreed to, and these should be reflected in any briefing documents to ensure that it happens.
- As part of this, review the access statement to ensure that commitments are being met, and build in plans for addressing any new or known access barriers
Review your access and digital strategies
This would include a review of your social media and other marketing tools to find out how accessible they are, and if they’re being used effectively. We’d reflect on barriers highlighted during the digital access audit and ensure these learnings were applied across the whole strategy:
- Accessibility definition, requirements and legal etc
- Overview of access audit findings and current access levels
- How disabled users use the web and barriers
- Demonstration of a screen reader user using your site
- Existing marketing strategy and how to build in access
- Existing access and digital strategies to ensure that the audit findings, recommendations and prioritised action plan are built into the organisation’s strategy as a whole.
Building accessibility into your apps
Apps can make content very easy to use and readily available and accessible in many ways – as long as the technical accessibility of apps is considered.
The deadline for ensuring public sector apps reach double-A compliance was 23 June 2021. So if you’re a public sector organisation there is a legal requirement that your apps are also accessible. If you’re in the initial stages of planning or creating an app, I can help you take an ‘accessibility first’ approach and build in access and user consultation from the start – to ensure you reach the mandatory requirement for apps to reach ‘double-A’ according to WCAG .
Over the last 7 years I have been involved in the planning, project management and access user testing of trails and information apps for the museum sector, some more successful than others. I can refer to my findings and what works (and doesn’t) including my recent ‘Top 10 Tips for creating accessible apps’