Guidance

Guidance and tools for digital accessibility

Find the best guidance and tools to meet the accessibility regulations.

From:
Central Digital and Data Office and Government Digital Service
Published
1 February 2021
Last updated
9 August 2021 — See all updates

Meeting the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations

Leading a team on accessibility

If you lead a team and are responsible for the accessibility of your website this guidance will help you to meet the regulations. You could be working in a large government organisation or somewhere smaller like a school.

Accessibility requirements for public sector websites and apps

Working in a team making accessibility changes

If you work in a team that makes changes to your website this guidance will help you to know what you need to do to make your website meet the accessibility regulations.

Make your website or app accessible
Understand the WCAG principles, guidelines and success criteria
Follow accessibility guidance for your job role

Monitoring websites and mobile apps under the regulations

Find out how the Government Digital Service (GDS) is monitoring websites and mobile apps and understand how the sampling process works.

Public sector website and mobile application accessibility monitoring
Accessibility monitoring: How we test

Making your projects, programmes and infrastructure accessible and inclusive

Find out how to build, buy or supply accessible technology, and how this will help your programme.

Make things accessible and inclusive

Designing accessible services

When creating, updating or managing a service you need to think about accessibility. This guidance helps service designers and other people working on services to consider the most important facts when starting this work.

Making your service accessible

Find out what you should consider to make sure the service you’re building or managing is accessible.

Making your service accessible: An introduction

Using accessible styles, components and patterns

If you’re building your service on a .service.gov.uk domain, you should use the GOV.UK Design System’s accessible styles, components and patterns.

GOV.UK Design System

Including all users

There’s usually no alternative to using government services so they have to work for everyone. Making your service inclusive means making sure anyone who needs to can use it as easily as possible.

Making your service more inclusive

Testing with assistive technology

Testing with assistive technology throughout the development of your service will help you to find and fix accessibility problems and meet the needs of all your users.

Testing with assistive technologies

Finding user research participants

For your research to be effective, your participants must be actual or likely users of your service and you must include disabled people and people who use assistive technology. This guidance explains how to recruit the right participants.

Finding user research participants

Designing accessible content

Working with documents

If you are working with different content formats find out which ones work best to make things more accessible for all users.

Publishing accessible documents

Guidance for GOV.UK publishers

This content design guidance will help GOV.UK publishers make their content more accessible. It’s specifically written for people using the GOV.UK publishing tools, but it might still be useful if you publish elsewhere.

Find out about:

Working with data

If you produce spreadsheets or workbooks of data, find out how to make them accessible.

Optimise spreadsheets for accessibility

Creating accessible communications

Find out how to make your social media posts accessible and inclusive.

Accessible communications

Creating inclusive communications

Learn about communicating inclusively, portraying disability and how to make different types of accessible formats available.

Inclusive communication

Testing with accessibility personas

Find out about accessibility personas and how to use them to test your products and services.

Using persona profiles to test accessibility

Accessibility training

You can sign up for the following free training opportunities:

Your website accessibility statement

You need an accessibility statement on your website or mobile app which details accessibility problems you have not fixed yet and any you are working on to resolve.

Use this sample accessibility statement to help you to write one for your organisation.

Sample accessibility statement

Join the accessibility community

Learn more about accessibility and share ideas and experiences with people working on solving accessibility problems across the public sector.

Find out more about the accessibility community

Updates to this page

Published 1 February 2021
Last updated 9 August 2021 + show all updates

  1. Link added to guidance on how to meet WCAG 2.1 principles and success criteria.

  2. Links added to online resources including how to make technology and communications accessible and inclusive, using the GOV.UK Design System, testing with accessibility personas and free training. Links to content design guidance for GOV.UK publishers and working with data.

  3. Removing duplication from the 'Including all users' section.

  4. New content linking to the Service Manual and information on the website sampling process

  5. First published.

Sign up for emails or print this page

Contents

Related content