The UK Government have issued statements which apply to any governing bodies, councils and other publicly funded projects, indicating the responsibility to provide information in formats accessible to everyone.

Creating accessible content can be challenging, it requires taking the time to evaluate what’s necessary and what works well, to avoid confusing your users. There are decision trees which need to be evaluated every time you want to put an image on the page, for example the alt tag decision tree. Every new component added to the website should be carefully evaluated and directly compared against it’s competitors because a large part of the web plugin ecosystem is still not WCAG compliant in 2022.

gov.uk provide their own design system which can be used for websites which need to use styles consistent with the Government. The design system includes a list of components which are all accessible out of the box. The components are part of an express app, meaning you’re running node server.

Essentially, as many people as possible should be able to use your website. That means that you should be able to:

• change colours, contrast levels and fonts
• zoom in up to 300% without text dropping off the screen
• navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
• navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
• listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)