Having an accessibility statement is part of our legal responsibilities to meet the public sector bodies accessibility regulations (PSBAR).
These regulations were put in place to make sure government services are accessible for anyone who wants or needs to use them.
In the legislation it states an accessibility statement must:
- be in an accessible format
- be published on the website
- detail accessibility failures
- detail any accessible alternatives
- give contact details to report any issues
We do not currently have a consistent way of ensuring our products and websites have statements. We also know that many products and websites that have accessibility statements:
- are not accurate
- are missing legally required wording
- do not detail the problems that exist
Opportunity to raise accessibility standards
We have an opportunity to develop a product that supports service teams meet their legal obligations. Ithelp users understand the accessibility of our products, websites and services.
Some people may experience barriers to using our products and websites. They need to know how to tell us about any issues they have using our service, so that we can either fix it or provide an alternative for the user.
Accessibility statements:
- give information on who to contact if people get stuck
- stops people wasting their time if they cannot use the product or website
- empowers people to hold us accountable if our services do not meet legal requirements
- helps our services to be legally compliant
Service requirements
We need to create a product that allows service teams to record, maintain and update the information that must be contained within an accessibility statement. This includes known accessibility issues, alternatives and planned improvements.
To get the requirements for the service, we looked at some examples of accessibility statements and extracted the conditional parts of the statements. This allowed us to find out what information we need to gather from users within our service.
Users and research thinking
We interviewed Andy Jones (Head of Design) to discover more about accessibility statements and who may be using our service. We then made journey maps for different users such as a product manager, delivery manager, designer, and developer.
We will conduct research with potential users to find out how teams currently track and record accessibility issues and produce their accessibility statements. This will help inform the development of our service.