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Accessibility

Accessibility checklist

This checklist gives advice on the main accessibility issues you should address and details of some free checking tools and techniques you can use. Some checks need you to review the content by eye, for example to avoid unclear wording, text embedded in images or cluttered layouts, but these checks do not require deep technical knowledge.

Help from the Components Editor

The Components Editor, for publishing and editing web content within SiteBuilder, provides an accessibility pane which details issues with the content on your page as you edit it, along with options for fixing them.

Web editing is a major part of my job

If much of your job is related to web editing you should have a good understanding of the principles of accessibility and WCAG 2.1. We suggest you follow the steps below.

Get started

Familiarise yourself with the editor checklist and apply the principles when creating new pages.

For existing pages do an audit of your pages or website to work out what you need to make accessible first to comply with legislation. We suggest looking at high traffic pages first. Any issues that can't be fixed quickly should be recorded and added to the University's Accessibility Statement - please contact us at webaccessibility at warwick dot ac dot uk.

Apply the guidance here

Apply our guidance for creating and checking pages. When running accessibility tests you will need to combine testing with automated tools and manual checks, as described. Manual checks include testing samples of pages with assistive technologies, for example screen readers.

For websites that you commission, you should ensure the supplier creates the site to the WCAG 2.1 AA standard.

Accessibility training

There are lots of training materials on the web about accessibility. AbilityNet, for example, provides regular short training sessions. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative also provides introductory training, often free.

Please watch a series of training workshops around accessibility created at Warwick by Academic Technology. These cover accessibility for Word, PowerPoint, audio, video, maths equations and Moodle. With thanks to Kerry Pinny.

Digital Marketing has also created this web site of guidance, which is well worth reading.

Understand WCAG 2.1

Public pages must meet the WCAG 2.1 at level AA. You should familiarise yourself with what you need to do and start updating your pages, following the guidance here. Note that PDFs and Word documents are included.