Accessibility guidance - as a whole

[ericlamarca]

What

Guidance to help teams make services more accessible.

Why

• In discovery, several teams mentioned they found it difficult to get accessibility right.
• Some participants said they found W3C guidance hard to use or intimidating.

Anything else

Nomensa's recent accessibility work has uncovered issues that need to be addressed. They've also worked on activity guides that could be a good start for the service manual.

Latest

The guidance is now live: https://service-manual.nhs.uk/accessibility.

Please use this issue to feedback on the guidance as a whole, or comment on the GitHub issues for specific pages below. We're particularly interested in accessibility research findings.

• Accessibility guidance: What all NHS services need to do about accessibility
• Accessibility guidance: How to make digital services accessible
• Accessibility guidance: Getting started with accessibility
• Accessibility guidance: Download accessibility posters
• Accessibility guidance for content
• Accessibility guidance for design
• Accessibility guidance for development
• Accessibility guidance for product and delivery
• Accessibility guidance for testing
• Accessibility guidance for user research

[sarawilcox]

We're using Nomensa's activity guides to create a suit of guidance for the different roles. We've done initial design and testing and are iterating the content and design now.

[theonlymojo]

We've now published a first version of accessibility guidance here:

https://service-manual.nhs.uk/accessibility

If you'd like to contribute ideas or specific areas for improvement then please create new github issues in the backlog and add the Practices label.

[terrynhsx]

Accessibility is often seen as a bolt-on fix by the producers of information - but their roles have a significant part to play when they can understand the challenges they raise whenever they design: make a format choice e.g. "Let's create a video about..." and then proceed to interview X about Y - something interesting but long. rambling and loosely structured can follow. The Higher Education communities have wrestled with this type of issue for years and there is plenty of advice and guidance out there but it needs to be read and acted upon by the original content authors, not just the digital publishers. It's not just a "web problem".
Making accessibility more role-focussed, with advice, can help. Example for teachers but could be any other role in principle. https://accessibility.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2016/03/14/6-tips-teach/

[JackMatthams]

We have decided to remove: "You may be able to include people with other needs too if you adapt the scenario, for example, by using the wizard-behind-a-curtain method to explore screenreader interactions. (This is where users think that they are using a real system but in fact the researcher is controlling it.)" from the 'Involve people with access needs at every stage' section of the User research: accessibility guidance page. This is following feedback from user researchers who believe the example does not fit in the context of the section, and would best be removed to avoid confusion.