Before making a guide

The Library and Learning Services (LLS) website and Ask Us are both publicly available and anyone can look at them. This means that we are not sure of any differing needs that the users have and so we must consider various different barriers to easy access. WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) particularly considered the needs of the following groups of people;

• On the autistic spectrum
• Who use screen readers
• Low vision
• Physical or motor disabilities
• Deaf or are hard of hearing
• Dyslexia.

We all understand that this does not cover every barrier and so there is a caveat that information can be provided in an alternative format and that users can make specific requests for accessible documents that meet their needs. There is an accessibility statement that will explain this to all users.

The Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group created the WCAG to ensure that all government and public bodies do not put barriers in the way of people accessing information. This is the overview that the group published.

Read through these guides and plan your layout. Have a look at the group titles and think about where is the best place for your guide to map to. Create your guide and assign it to the correct group.

SpringShare who provide the software for the LLS website and Ask Us have made the compliance process easier by setting defaults to compliant options. There are still checks to be made of content that has been altered, older entries and objects like images that have not originated in the site. We also need to make sure that all our online output meets these guidelines. These guides will outline what we need to do make our guides accessible and how we can test them.

There is training available in LinkedIn called 'Creating accessible documents in Microsoft office' There is also a course entitled ‘Web accessibility concepts’  although it does not deal with the specifics of WCAG, it is full of good ideas about good practice based on user experience research. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 are also publicly available.