Introduction

Last October (2015), a selection of pages on the NHS Choices website was audited by AbilityNet for conformance against:

W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)
Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP 1.0).

Findings →

✘ Failed

Based on this evaluation, the Website does not meet WCAG 2.0, conformance level AA.

AbilityNet

What is web accessibility?

Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the web

W3C

"Disabilities" - visual , auditory , physical , speech, cognitive and neurological
"Use" - people can perceive, understand, navigate, interact, and contribute to the web

Why care?

11 million people in Great Britain have a limiting long term illness, impairment or disability - gov.uk
The Equality Act 2010 (formerly the Disability Discrimination Act 1995)
- Discrimination against people with disabilities is prohibited by law.
  This includes websites.

The issues

Screen reader and keyboard only users may find it difficult to navigate the site
Lists, accordions, tabs, error messages not declared properly for screen reader users
Missing ALT text on images
No audio description or captions for videos
Visually impaired users not able to resize font size with IE

AbilityNet Report (pdf, 45.2mb)

Examples

Navigation and tabbed content
- Before
- After
Screen reader
- Find services widget
  - Before
  - After
  Find services widget - before
  
  Single finger swipe to move to the next element seems to move to the next tab audibly, but double tapping does not select the tab correctly. Therefore the user can only make a GP search.
  
  Find services widget - after
  
  Single finger swipe to move to the next element correctly moves to the next tab. Double tapping correctly selects the option. Then you can swipe to the input field and enter content.
- Footer
  - Before
  - After
  Footer - before
  
  Using VoiceOver, the audio wording for the footer is not very descriptive and helpful.
  
  Footer - after
  
  The wording has been improved with the use of ARIA labels.
  
  "Site policies. Tab. One of Six. Collapsed."

Conclusions

Most of the issues found were fixed.

A few outstanding issues still exist and are being investigated, such as adding captions, transcripts and audio descriptions to videos.

Funnelback

An automated accessibility audit gets generated every week by Funnelback, so there is work taking place to have a look and fix these as part of our regular release cycle.

User research

There are plans to do more user research around the area of accessibility and usability.

Accessibility does matter

Longer version of video