Sitemorse report on accessibility

You may recently have seen a report issued by automated accessibility checker Sitemorse on Accessibility across local authority websites. The report sets out the position as at Q4/2019 across the sector and examines how local authorities are managing the timeline to achieve compliance with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations by September 2020.

The Sitemorse Q4 report is the last to be produced in partnership with Socitm as part of its BetterConnected+ service. From February, the society will be working with Silktide to generate monthly reports for its members.

Only 10 authorities have achieved a score of 10 out of 10 for accessibility out of the 400 local authority websites tested with Sitemorse. For those councils who have received a lower score than they expected, it would be worthwhile investigating those scores to see where accessibility issues are occurring. SDS could assist with this review and offer advice about how to address any concerns.

59% of PDFs were found not to be tagged for accessibility which indicates a significant piece of work for all local authorities in the lead up to the deadline.

SDS could help you achieve this goal. We understand that this is a monumental task for local authorities who often have in excess of 500 PDFs to tag for accessibility. We are offering a hands-on workshop for your service managers and content creators to understand what accessibility means for them with tips and tricks for producing compliant online documents in Word and Excel.

We can also help you with template creation for services and even offer to take on some of the conversion for you.

Please look at our training and workshops web page and contact us if we can help you in any way.

Access the Sitemorse statistics here.