Accessibility Statements V4

Well here we are. I have been personally critiquing accessibility statements now for more than a year, starting back in August 2019 prior to the ‘new websites’ deadline under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (PSBAR or ‘the regulations’).

Now the regulations have come into full effect for all websites new and old as of the 23rd September 2020. This gives us the great opportunity to observe compliance growth over the course of a year and now see who is and is not meeting the legal requirements.

If you are interested in looking back at the journey thus far you can see all the previous versions on this site:

• V1 - The original study Sept 2019

• V2 - The first update Oct 2019

• V3 - Expanded to create discussion about “essential services” and show some other countries May 2020

What is this research?

This is a personal project that I have spent well over 400 hours on in the last year, looking at nearly 8000 entries over all versions. I am very pleased that over the last year this research has had much positive feedback from people who have been listed and even been commended by the European Commission as the only coherent monitoring of its kind.

This research is a test of accuracy against the format and requirements of the Government Digital Service (GDS) sample statement. This is in no way a representation of what GDS think or may be likely to monitor against. There is a difference between compliance and excellence, and statements that I have marked as technically compliant may not provide useful content to users, while good attempts that have some technical mistakes may be wonderfully useful in supporting users. GDS may (and in all hopes will) chose to focus more on accessibility issues and their remediation rather than absolute compliance with the legally required wording.

GDS or other members of the public could still find fault. In my experience it is likely that compliant and good attempts are both very close to the sample statement expectation and at this point it becomes arguments over specific wording rather than whether useful content is present for users, which we should all remember is the important thing. Those that I would wish to address are those marked poor or no statement, while all in compliant or good I commend for their work.

The aim of this research is to pull out trends across organisations that can help us better plan wider support or identify where improved communication or support may be offered. This is not about picking out individual organisations, although I share the information for transparency and people's own interest. As you will see in the observations section, it is all about identifying widespread issues that may require action.

I think this is going to be the last update on the UK research. Although I felt that way about last time too, so we will see if people manage to compel me to go through this a fifth time in future. As always this is my personal work and opinions and it takes a lot of time to manually read every statement. There may be the occasional mistake and if you want to talk about any of it please contact us.

What’s changed in V4

With this being a really important update given that now if you don’t have a statement or meet the compliance requirements you could not be meeting legal requirements, I have trimmed back the list to focus more on those that in my opinion fall clearly in scope of the regulations. The only points of argument with this are the Disability Assessment Centres (DACs) and the Associations of Local Councils. The DACs some of which are charities or companies, but the argument is that they receive their funding from Disabled Student Allowance in part and are specifically there to address the needs of disabled individuals. The Associations of Local Councils are membership organisations and believe themselves exempt yet receive all funding from their members which are public sector bodies so could be included.

In addition to the trimmed back list, I have also been extra pedantic about compliance with the GDS template in this version. Since the last update back in May, my understanding of the GDS template, reasoning for certain pieces of content and compliance expectations have grown, and now I believe the only way to be sure of meeting monitoring expectations is to be as close to the GDS template as possible. Because of this all grades are based on how close to GDS requirements the statement comes and this will be explained further in the Grading section.

In addition I have also tried to record the compliance status claimed by each organisation and how many organisations have claimed a disproportionate burden.

Different to previous versions, the V4 list no longer contains a notes column detailing the specific issues of each entry although that data does exist in my master list.

Want to find out more about your result?

If you would like the service of knowing why we scored you the way we did you can contact us or you may be interested in the support we provide on accessibility statements.

For £100+VAT we are offering to provide you a clear breakdown of compliance wording issues with your specific statement, an amended version, and a compliant template with very clear, step by step instructions that you can use for your future statements.

Reminder about compliance

Back in April 2020, GDS specified ‘legally required’ parts of an accessibility statement which must be followed. You can see this in the GDS sample accessibility statement. This update was to join together requirements from the regulation document as well as the UK adopted EU model statement.

What a statement must now deliver:

• Specific wording about which website a statement refers to and who the website is run by. (Heading required as specified in the EU model statement)

• Feedback and contact information section (Heading required as specified in the EU model statement)

• Reporting accessibility problems with this website (Regulations doc)

• Enforcement procedure - specific wording (Heading required as specified in the EU model statement)

• Technical information - specific wording

• Compliance status - specific wording in which you must say whether the website is full, partially or not-compliant and the reasons why [insert one of the following: ‘the non-compliances’, ‘the exemptions’ or ‘the non-compliances and exemptions’]

• Known issues and reasonable adjustments or other actions being taken to resolve the issues. This must be in the specific heading structure detailed below and you must include these headings:

  • Non accessible content (h2)

    • Non-compliance with the accessibility regulations (h3) - In this section you must describe in non-technical terms, as far as possible, how the content is not accessible, including reference(s) to the applicable requirements in the relevant standards and/or technical specifications that are not met

    • Disproportionate burden (h3)

    • Content that’s not within the scope of the accessibility regulations (h3)

• Preparation of this accessibility statement (Heading required as specified in the EU model statement)

Further to this there is the expectation that the statement is easily available from all pages of the website.

Grading

As I have mentioned previously, the grading for this one has changed slightly because I am now being very strict in grading statements based on their alignment with the GDS template due to the stricter compliance expectations.

This is in no way a representation of what GDS think or may be likely to monitor against. There is a difference between compliance and excellence, and statements that I have marked as technically compliant may not provide useful content to users, while good attempts that have some technical mistakes may be wonderfully useful in supporting users. GDS may (and in all hopes will) chose to focus more on accessibility issues and their remediation rather than absolute compliance with the legally required wording.

Because of this there has been some fluctuation in many organisations’ results. For example, some which I have previously awarded “good attempt” because of their general useful accessibility information, mention of the accessible information standard or other commendable actions, may now be listed as “poor attempt” because despite their commendable content, they do not contain any of the legally required information expected for compliance with the regulations.

Sometimes I may not find your statement or assess the wrong page. If I cannot find a statement in the footer or available through search then it is not meeting expectations for it to be easily available to users and you should make it more prominent on the website.

The updated grades are as follows.

Findings

You can download the Version 4 November 2020 dataset to look at the information gathered for yourself.

I have also created an online map as always that has been embedded below because I think by now we all agree it's all about the maps with me.

I think it is important to show the changes in saturation of compliance statements across each group through the research. The problem with this update is that with the new stringent compliance expectations many groups have dropped in the number of compliant statements. With that said I think it is important to look at the number of good attempts as well. Good attempts in this iteration of the research represent statements that are missing out on compliance by only a small margin and so a more accurate representation of the effort put in by so many organisations is to look at both compliant and good attempts.

As discussed above I think it is far more valuable to compare the growth of compliant and good attempts with the previous research, because these represent the vast majority of statements based on the GDS template albeit with a variety of errors. As can be seen from the bar chart above (and is described in the collapsed content above) for all areas there have been significant increases in the total numbers of compliant and good attempts. This is more prevalent in those latecomer areas such as the NHS and Regulators, both of which have seen massive growth. There has on average been less movement across Local Government, Universities and Colleges.

Another interesting change is the Police. Because they use a single platform design, they all share statements using the same template. Because these are using an older version, they each have too many mistakes to be classed as compliant, and so all of the previously marked compliant police statements are now listed as good.

What is disappointing out of this assessment is that only Local Government and Police have gone above 50% coverage for compliant and good attempts. Colleges in particular still have barely any regulation compliant statements as a group. A fact that particularly irks me as I personally emailed hundreds of Principles of low scoring Colleges from V3 in an attempt to raise awareness and avoid this result.

Finally an additional mention of the number of Local Council Associations that have produced good statements. Many of these organisations do not believe they are in scope but are committed to leading by example for their Parish and Town Council members and so have also produced statements aligning with the regulations. This is to be commended as I know that across the Associations and their members there have been a lot of awareness raising work about the regulations, which is a massive feat given the tiny size of most Parish and Town Councils.

Sector Results

Observations

Compliant and Good attempts

Given that we are now past the regulation deadline for all website it is pleasing to see that there has been such a large upward trend in the number of good attempts across the board. While the number of compliant statements has not really changed this is more due to my increased strictness with the grading and most that are classed as a good attempt are only falling short by small margins. Compliant and good attempts represent 33.3% of all entries in this research.

I think this shows that a large number of organisations have tried to complete accessibility statements as required but for many there just has not been enough support or clear guidance available to help them understand the nuance of getting all elements of a statements right.

I also think it has not helped that the sample statement (the expected format all must comply with) was changed in April 2020 and little publicity was done to inform organisations of the changes in requirements. I think we see the consequences of this in the drops across several early adopter groups (due to many using older statement templates that are now not compliant), while latecomers have increased in compliance levels because they have adopted the latest template.

Many missing statements

There are still so many organisations without statements or the quality of their accessibility information is appalling. I wish to point out and be especially scathing to those organisations such as Local Government and Universities that still do not have statements for their main websites. Local Government and Universities have been the primary groups that has received the majority of awareness raising support, so after two years of being told about this, to still not have a statement close to the correct format is a shocking display of disregard for the support needs of their disabled users as well as their legal obligations.

Disproportionate burden

Over this update I have recorded 275 live disproportionate burden claims. Not only is that a very large number of organisations that feel they are unable to meet the regulation requirements, but the examples I have recorded have been in my personal opinion, ill informed and hazardous to the organisations making the claims. To clarify what I mean by this, in previous work I have seen the majority of claims have poor or no evidence and based on the evidence I believe this trend is continuing.

Many of the examples I have seen this update have the following problems:

• Organisations are using the template wording for specific claims - Many organisations see the example claims in the sample statement and assume that they must be valid and therefore surely they do not have to comply for those things either. Disproportionate burden claims are unique to each organisation so copying this text and making a claim without evidence because you saw it in the sample statement puts your organisation at risk.

• Organisations claim exemptions for things that are actually exemptions already - If something is already an exemption, for example; online maps, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO CLAIM DISPROPORTIONATE BURDEN! No one was expecting you to fix it in the first place. Many organisations clearly are not familiar with the wording of the regulations and make specific disproportionate burden claims for pre-2018 PDFs, pre-2020 video content, online maps, public submitted documents and other exemptions.

Reporting and Enforcement

My final negative observations is a series of problems with the enforcement procedure listed in nearly every statement. Users are told to contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS) for advice and support before escalation to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). Since February 2020 I have been nagging both organisations to place some information about the regulations and their role within the enforcement process on their respective websites. At time of writing this still has not been done. Through both contact forms there is never a mention of digital accessibility, websites or the regulations to allow a user to clearly categorise their complaint under the regulations. To complete the lack of support for users the EASS has listed all their non-accessible content as disproportionate burden. I will let readers make up their own mind as to how the reporting point for accessibility breaches, is itself not accessible and plans to take no immediate action to rectify the situation given the likely expectation that many users of the reporting function will be disabled and have accessibility requirements.

Compliance Statuses

This time round I have also monitored the compliance status claims for each organisation. Statements are required to claim full, partial or not-compliant with the accessibility regulations.

My first accessibility mentor to whom I owe so much, disliked the inclusion of partially compliant and I feel that he was correct in his assumption. The evidence shows that 87.25% of organisations I have results for, claim partial compliance while only 9.46% claim full compliance and 3.29% claim not-compliant. The vast majority have chosen to say partially compliant rather than not compliant even though both mean a failure to meet required standards. This is just a use of placatory wording when in reality (now including organisations that have unknown claims) out of the 1806 organisations tested this time 96.01% of organisations have not met the requirements of the regulation by their own claim or omittance.

Sadly I am guilty of this as well, having chosen a scale of not-compliant grades ranging from 'good' to 'poor' where, were I to go hard-line I could have chosen compliant or not and made many more people unhappy. I would like to think that in some cases it is useful to identify how far away from a goal things are. For the case of partial and not-compliant status claims in statements however, I feel that there is no useful differentiation from claiming one over the other.

Up Next

I am going to be taking a break from accessibility statements for a while but the next big piece of All Able research will be an update to our Disproportionate Burden research. The next update will show responses from all 275 live disproportionate burden claims and what evidence is provided through FOI. This should hopefully give us some great insight and suggestions for how disproportionate burden misuse can be reduced.

Sources

For this research I used a number of sources to develop the dataset. For each of the groups I had to find organisational lists. The ones I used are:

• Local Authorities – LGA list of Local Authorities

• Universities – The complete university guide league tables

• Police Forces – Police.UK list of forces

• Fire & Rescue Services – National Fire Chiefs list of Services

• Colleges – Further Education Finder

• NHS Organisations – NHS Service Directory

• Industry Regulators - Wikipedia list of regulators

• Disability Assessment Centres - NNAC find an assessment centre list

Get in touch

I hope that people find this research and my thoughts on accessibility statements of use. If you want to talk about this research or want help with ensuring your compliance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Application) (No.2) Accessibility regulations 2018 please contact us.

Disclaimer

This research is not perfect and was completed as a personal endeavour that I gladly share publicly in the hope that it can prove useful to improving accessibility across the UK Public Sector.

In this research I have included a number of bodies that could be argued to not be in scope of the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 under the current interpretation. In this research I am at no point speculating that any of the organisations listed are not performing their legally required duty under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Application) (No.2) Accessibility regulations 2018, Equality Act 2010 or any other legislation.

This research is for general information only and is not legal advice. All Able Ltd will not accept liability for any loss, damage or inconvenience arising as a consequence of any use of, or the inability to use any information contained within this research.