News from the Cabinet Office

Public consultation on Delivering Inclusive Websites

"Websites which fail to meet the mandated level of conformance shall be subject to the withdrawal process for .gov.uk domain names, as set out in Naming and Registering Websites."

In order to meet European objectives for inclusive e-government and so that the UK public sector meets its obligations with regards to disability legislation, we have proposed that all government websites must meet Level Double-A of the W3C guidelines by December 2008.

Government websites are strongly recommended to develop an accessibility policy to aid the planning and procurement of inclusive websites. This includes building a business case, analysing user needs, developing an accessibility test plan and procuring accessible content authoring tools. The guidance covers some of the design solutions to common problems faced by users but is mainly aimed at strategic managers and project managers to assist with planning and procurement.

This usually means that within 5 years we as developers and designers will need to use all our knowledge to produce sites which are within these guidelines (which we should be doing already), those of us who do so now are finding it not to be as difficult as first thought, yes, it might take a little longer but that is just because aws with anything we are not used to it just takes practice, alot of it is common sense, dirty words I know but in the long run isn’t the idea to reach as many people as possible with our ideas and products?

The following is the ’bare bones’ of the article regarding Content Design, the full document can be read at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/government_it/web_guidelines/consultations.aspx
Comments are invited before 13th November 2007

TEXT

Keep the content simple

Don’t use justified text

Use a non-serif font

Limit the use of graphical text

Ensure that font size can be increased

LINKS AND NAVIGATION

Make a big clickable area

Use descriptive links

Provide a site map

Provide skip links

IMAGES

Use images and icons

Provide alternative (alt) text

COLOUR

Allow for flexibility

Do not rely on colour alone to convey information

Use good contrasting colours

LAYOUT

Provide a consistent design

Make use of white space

FORMS

Associate text labels with form fields

TABLES

Associate data cells with their headers for data tables

MULTIMEDIA

Ensure animation can be paused or switched off

Provide captions or transcripts of important audio content

Provide text equivalents for a movie