Building accessible digital products

Sense believes that no one, no matter how complex their disabilities, should be isolated, left out, or unable to fulfil their potential.  Digital products and services are an increasingly important part of what Sense does and it’s essential that these are as accessible as possible.

This means accommodating people that have:

  • Impaired vision
  • Motor difficulties
  • Cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
  • Deafness or impaired hearing

All Sense-related digital products and services must:

  1. Meet level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) as a minimum.
  2. Work on the most commonly used assistive technologies, such as screen magnifiers, screen readers and speech recognition tools.
  3. Include disabled people in user research.
  4. Have an accessibility statement that explains how this product is accessible and what to do if something does not meet your accessibility needs.

Digital content

Ask the following questions when you’re planning and testing:

  • Have you made it as easy as possible for people living with disabilities to engage with your digital communications content and channels? This is about use of alt text, captions, Camel case for hashtags, colour contrast and so on.
  • Is your digital communications content clear, concise and easy to digest?
  • Is the content shareable?
  • Is your call to action clear?

Our digital publishing guide explains how digital content should be produced to be as accessible as possible.

Exemptions

You may not need to have all the following types of content completely accessible, but you must explain this in the accessibility statement:

  • Live audio and video.
  • Archived materials like scanned manuscripts.
  • Embedded maps – but you’ll need to provide essential information in an accessible format like an address.
  • Third party content that’s under someone else’s control.
  • Archived websites that clearly don’t provide services anymore.

Testing

We are committed to testing our websites, apps, products and services with disabled people and people with access needs.

For more information and support, or if you have have or find accessibility issues with our digital products and services, please contact [email protected]