Skills & Tools
Accessibility Audit, Expert Review, WCAG Guideline, Screenreader, HTML, CSS
Background
My Care Budget is an online peer support community platform that enables personal health budget (PHB) users to share useful resources such as templates and staffing policies.
Importance of Web Accessibility
15% of the world’s population have some form of long term illness, impairment, or disability with many more suffering from temporary disabilities, who may require assistive technology to enable full and equal access to the internet.
Under the Equality Act 2010, companies are obliged by law to make their website inclusive and accessible by meeting Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 as a minimum.
Failure to consider user diversity will not only lead to technological exclusion for a section of the society (Gabriel and Benoit, 2003), but also miss out on around 20% of customers (Hassell, 2019).
Objective
To illustrate 1) findings from expert accessibility review conducted on four sample pages of My Care Budget using WCAG 2.1, and 2) provide recommendations on how to achieve conformance and improve accessibility.
Methodology
Review Period: 16 Nov - 9 Dec 2021 (2 months)
Guideline Reference: Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.1
Tools Used:
• 13” MacBook Pro (MacOS Big Sur Version 11.6)
• Safari version 15.0 (16612.1.29.41.4, 16612)
• Chrome browser version 95.0.4638.69 (Official Build) (arm64)
• W3C’s Easy Checks for Preliminary Review
• Keyboard (Tab keys)
• Screenreader (VoiceOver)
• W3C Markup Validator
Elements were investigated both individually and collectively to evaluate consistency between identification, functionality and navigation.
Each issue identified has been assigned a severity rating following an adapted severity scale (Figure 1) along with potential improvements. Audit findings are presented according to their severity level, providing developers a clear roadmap on the order and methodology to enhance accessibility and usability of My Care Budget and in turn facilitate more efficient allocation of resources to fix issues
Figure 1: Adaptation of Rubin (1994)'s Four-Step Severity Scale
Expert Accessibility Review Findings
Conclusion
My Care Budget has failed to meet certain Level A (Basic), and Level AA (Better) conformance as multiple violation of the WCAG guideline were found.
Recommendations
Short term: To immediately resolve level 4: unusable issues as they significantly hinder the access and sharing of information for users with disabilities, defying My Care Budget’s mission statement.
Long term: After addressing all identified issues for Level A and AA compliant, My Care Budget should aim to achieve Level AAA (Best) conformance for some content. Continuous accessibility check is also recommended in conjunction with accessibility testing involving users with different disabilities.
