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Accessibility monitoring of public sector websites and mobile apps 2020-2021

This report details how the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) monitored around 600 public sector websites for accessibility issues over almost two years. They tested based on the EN 301 549 standard, version 2.1.2, which maps closely to WCAG 2.1 accessibility levels A and AA.

Accessibility issues were found on “nearly all” of the sites. The CDDO would send a report to the website owner and check again after 12 weeks, by which time 59% had fixed the issues or set “short-term deadlines” for fixing the remaining issues. 20% of organisations did not respond to the initial contact.

“Disproportionate burden may be claimed where the impact of fully meeting the accessibility regulations is too much for an organisation to reasonably complete”. 32% of websites contacted claimed disproportionate burden. Some of these provided detailed reasoning as to the costs and benefits to their users. Some organisations were grateful for their audit report, which was sometimes the first they’d heard about accessibility regulations. Others did not respond positively; one stated it “took valuable resources away from priority pandemic-related work”.

The most common issues were a lack of keyboard focus styles, low colour contrast and “parsing issues” (e.g. no label associated with form input). Accessibility statements are becoming out of date (many were published in September 2018/2019), with just 7% containing all required information. By the end of the monitoring process, 80% had full compliance.

The report details what tools CDDO used and how the audit was conducted. Worth a read!

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