Accessibility
I help make websites work for everyone. I'm a senior accessibility specialist at the Government Digital Service (GDS), part of the UK Cabinet Office.
WCAG refers to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to levels A and AA, unless stated.
Resources
Some accessibility resources I've worked on that you might find useful.
- Accessibility testing guide
- A detailed guide on how we test for each Web Content Accessibility Guideline criterion, led by Anika Henke and written with Annie Streater, Katherine Badger, Kelly Clarkson and Richard Morton.
- Checklists and cheat sheets
- There are many accessibility checklists out there and every auditor has their own way of testing. These unofficial cheat sheets show what works for me.
- WCAG checklist: WCAG distilled into a practical order for testing, covering levels A and AA, with links back to each WCAG page.
- WCAG decision tree: work out which criterion something might fail on, updated for WCAG 2.2.
- Mobile test guide: How our team applies WCAG to mobile apps.
- Screen reader cheat sheet: Main commands for six screen readers, all on one page.
- Accessibility links: Some of the most useful accessibility links I've collected over time, grouped by topic.
- Presentation: Accessibility doesn't have to be hard
- For South West User Experience (SWUX), October 2022. The talk encourages you to bake accessibility into your teams, discussing different mindsets and mythbusting. It then gives practical advice on how to test, and building accessibility into your websites upfront.
- Contrast checker for multiple colours
- Choose multiple colours (spectrum) to check contrast ratios for WCAG.
My work
Accessibility monitoring at Government Digital Service
UK public sector websites and mobile applications need to be accessible and publish an accessibility statement to meet the UK accessibility regulations. Our team monitors this. My main role is to carry out detailed audits, using manual and automated tests, while helping to improve accessibility awareness and knowledge.
Image credit: Stephen McCarthy
- Blog post: How mobile apps undergo accessibility monitoring
-
An overview of the challenges we've faced applying WCAG to mobile apps, along with a case study.
- Video: What WCAG 2.2 means for UK public sector websites and apps
-
A presentation with Chris Heathcote covering the latest draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (version 2.2), and what public sector organisations need to do about them.
- Video: Why would you want to exclude anyone?
-
A brief appearance on the Government Digital Service Twitter account to talk about our accessibility work for Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2023. You may need to be signed into Twitter to view this.
- Our monitoring
- How our team monitors websites and apps.
- Blog post: websites need to be accessible to be inclusive
- An overview of how the monitoring team tests for accessibility.
- 2021 report
- Our detailed report on what we've tested and our findings so far.
Up to December 2023, I have completed:
- 32 detailed website audits
- 9 mobile app audits across iOS and Android
- with 799 accessibility issues fixed as a direct result of these tests
- 26 simplified website audits
- 451 reviews of auditors' reports
Defra accessibility
My accessibility work at the UK's Department of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs:
- Defra's original accessibility guidance and accessibility checklist, used across the digital team.
- automated accessibility tests using Axe in the Waste Exemptions test suite
- Defra's first accessibility statements on four of its services
I have worked several times with the Digital Accessibility Centre where our services have been tested by people with disabilities. This has given me a deeper understanding of how people use assistive technologies, to inform my testing and design reviews.
For example, people with low vision often look for content on the left hand side of a page. So we've learnt to avoid floating text in the middle or right of the page.
Accessibility statement for andrewhick.com
How accessible this website is
This website has been tested against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v2.1 level AA.
The site meets this standard except for some content which relies on vision.
If you need more information on anything on this website then please contact me through the details at the end of the page.
Non-accessible content
Most of my hobbies are visual, so some content is not fully accessible to some people with a visual impairment. The following steps have been taken to improve their accessibility where possible:
- Art, design and puzzles
- All artistic content is presented with alternative text.
- Mind maps
- Each mind map is summarised with alternative text, with links back to the original courses or course providers where available.
- Games
- The Pandora game relies on vision to complete it. However it includes the following features to improve accessibility:
- The main character can be highlighted with a spotlight.
- Sound and music is not essential, and can be toggled on and off.
- Hints can be toggled on or off.
- There is no time limit to complete the game.
This statement was last updated on 27 June 2023.