So that’s it! You’ve reached the end of our introductory course on Accessibility Awareness. I hope you found it informative and helpful.
If you did find it informative and helpful I would be grateful if you could fill out our feedback form here
We would particularly like to know if the awareness gained during the course will make a difference to your practice moving forward. It’s the kind of thing that is both important to know for our practice and its part of the reporting we have to make to our funders.
We have a number of other courses available which are more focused on individual areas of digital accessibility. Courses in Accessible Office Documents or Accessible Social Media for example which, although similar in some parts, will go into more detail on their particular areas. See our training page for more details.
Throughout the course I have mentioned external resources such as software, statistics and studies etc. Please find links to all of these below.
It only remains for me to wish you a good day and thank you again for considering our training.
James
15/05/2023 Starbucks. Kirkcaldy
Additional Resources
Note that for software and online testing we can’t guarantee that it will work for you or that it will be safe on your systems. You should check all online resources with your own monitoring software before use.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
Contrastchecker.com to check the contrast of your online elements
Colour Checker to test for accessible colours
UK laws and regulations for our UK students.
Two of the main laws governing accessibility in the UK are the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. We will take a brief look at them below.
The Equality Act 2010
The Equality Act 2010 which came into force in October 2010 was set up to legally protect people in the UK from discrimination either in the workplace or wider society. It brought together and replaced the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, Race Relations Act 1976 and Disability Discrimination Act 1995. This obviously gives the Act a very wide remit but in terms of digital accessibility the Act states that digital content in the UK which provides a service should be accessible to all. Inaccessible content will put people with disabilities at a disadvantage as they will not be able to access it fully so is therefore deemed to be discriminatory.
You can have a look at the whole Act in its entirety here but I found an interesting article here which explains things from the point of view of a law firm in the UK.
The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018
On 23rd September 2018 the UK government introduced the aforementioned regulations for public sector organisations and charities who provide public services via websites or apps.
These regulations reference the WCAG standards that digital content should be perceivable, operable, understandable and robust and are in addition to an organisations obligations under the Equality Act 2010. They specifically state that the online content of public sector organisations and charities who provide public services must meet the WCAG 2.1 AA Standard for accessibility. Examples of the criteria in this standard includes the need for digital content to:
A full list of the criteria in the WCAG 2.1 AA Standard is available here
General information on the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 can be found here