Tower Hamlets had 10 separate websites that needed to be in line with the UK Public Sector Body Website Accessibility Regulations. For this they needed every site to be certified as WCAG 2.1 AA compliant.
We have built our own WCAG accessibility site scanner called Publica11y, which is built on software that received the highest Guidance rating in the government’s Accessibility Tool Audit. We started by using it to do full automated scans of the website to then identify systemic issues, i.e. issues replicated across multiple pages that can be fixed from a single point. These issues were passed along to Tower Hamlet’s various in-house site managers in the form of an audit report. The report takes each issue and identifies the cause and why it’s needed for accessibility, along with where possible screen-grabs of the affected area of the site, followed by a proposed fix.
Once the systemic issues were fixed we then rescanned the site and provided a follow-up report of remaining individual page issues. We also did manual inspections of pages key to user journeys using SiteImprove. After all the identified issues were fixed, we provided each site with an accessibility statement that lays out its current state of compliance.
We offer all Council Platform customers free regular accessibility audits of their sites using our Publica11y service.