You may or may not have seen me post about accessibility once or twice before. Well, here I go again… 🤣
This time it’s specifically in relation to our new LocalGov Drupal (LGD) website, to replace the current Luton.gov.uk website.
LGD, if you don’t already know, is a content management system (CMS) created by a community of developers, content designers and digital leaders from over 50 (and counting) local councils, from across the UK and Ireland. Currently, over 100 local authorities use LGD for their website.
The LGD website states: “It is a primary goal of the project to ensure that the LocalGov Drupal modules and themes are accessible to all users.”
So that’s the first step achieved – the technology and design behind our new website already conforms to government accessiblity legislation, namely the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR), annouced in 2018.
Consistency in our content
Now it’s up to us to make sure everything we add to the website complies with the regulations too. Although our current site passed a government accessibility review, there are still older documents and pages that can be vastly improved. And this redesign creates the perfect opportunity to do that!
As the CMS we currently use is older, we can’t ‘migrate’ the content. Migration is a simple way of moving all the content at once. But we’re essentially starting from scratch, populating the pages and sections of the new website individually and manually.
Yes, it’ll take longer, BUT it means everything will be reviewed, updated and formatted to be as accessible and user friendly as possible.
This means, of course, making sure the content is clear and simple enough so that most people can understand it without needing to adapt it, while supporting those who do need to adapt things.
LGD accessibility meetups
I regularly attend accessibility meetups with other LGD councils, meaning we stay up to date with the latest accessibility news.
Perfectly timed, is the launch of a new LGD module – Editoria11y accessibility checker. It’s just been added to our suite of content quality assurance tools. The module will test page content and recommend improvements before we publish, making our jobs just that little bit easier!
Accessibility helps us live up to our values
Accessibility means that people can do what they need to do in a similar amount of time and effort as someone that does not have a disability. It means that people are empowered, can be independent, and won’t be frustrated by something that’s poorly designed or implemented. Which will go a long way to ‘living our council values‘.
The Digital Services team is well versed in reviewing and creating accessible content, so we’ll be on hand to advise our services during the content redesign stage of the audit. We’ll be looking to:
- review the information architecture – the structure and order of the website and how people can find what they’re looking for
- reorganise sections to make the most sense to our visitors
- rewrite content to make sure it can be understood by as many people as possible
- recreate high demand documents as page content so they can easily be translated or read aloud
- make sure alternative text is added to all objects such as images, tables and charts
And most importantly, we’ll be user testing with the very people that, we hope, will have an even better experience with the new website. That will include, for example:
- people with impaired vision who might use:
- a screen reader – software that lets a user navigate a website and ‘reads out’ the content and structure
- screen magnifier software
- people with with motor difficulties might use:
- a special mouse
- speech recognition software
- on-screen keyboard emulator
A priority, not an afterthought
Accessibility is a high priority for us. Not just because it’s the law, but because accessible content is easier for everyone to access and understand. It’s the right thing to do and it benefits everyone.
One of our favourite phrases is ‘think accessiblity first‘ and that mantra will be at the forefront of our daily lives for the coming months. Wish us luck! 😁