Creating Accessibility Statements

Please note that you have to be signed in to Google with your University account to view the slides and videos on this page.

The self-guided training below was delivered by Alistair McNaught to identified system owners in 2024. Alistair has given us permission to share these slides and recordings within the University to enable other system owners to receive the training they need to create accessibility statements. The training takes about 4 hours in total to complete.

If your team would like an introduction on how to assess systems for accessibility compliance, get in touch with lilian.joy to arrange a 1.5 hour session.

Procurement guidance

If you are in the process of procuring a new system or product for the University, please read the following guide:

Accessibility Guidance for Procurement of University Digital Products & Services

Personas

You may find it helpful to keep the following personas in mind when procuring, designing or testing systems and processes (UoY login required).

Staff and student at a user research session.

Capturing your learning

The self-guided training below will take approximately 4 hours to complete. You can return to the training form at any time and make edits to your stored information. You may wish to review the questions before you begin your training so you can note the items you need to type up: Digital Accessibility and accessibility statements form.

EasyChecks by W3C

The training below references browser plug-ins to help with assessing accessibility. We are now able to recommend that you use EasyChecks by W3C in place of many of the plug-ins recommended in Alistair's training.

Part 1 - Legal background, practical tests and strategic approaches

McNaught York Testing Session Workshop 1 slides

The slides contain a video link to the recording of the training session. You can follow along to learn about:

Disability (Equality Act) versus accessibility (PSBAR)
Accessibility of your systems and how to communicate it.
What to do about Content in your systems
What a government audit will cover
How to manage your findings.

You will also learn how to conduct a series of simple accessibility tests on your systems that include

a Keyboard Test
a Magnification test
your media accessibility
navigation of your system or site
hyperlinks
tables
forms

Links mentioned in the recording can be accessed from the Additional Resources google doc.

Part 2 - Communicating with stakeholders

McNaught York Session Workshop 2 slides

The slides contain a video link to the recording of the training session. You can follow along to learn how to:

Identify the key stakeholders in the accessibility statement process,
Complete a template with action points for further exploration,
Explore sample accessibility statements to consider in a “compliant .v. useful” context,
Identify key sources for further support and exploration.

UoY example accessibility statements:

What to do next

When you have completed both parts of the training, you should draft an accessibility statement for your software or system. This statement should be added to a suitable location for users eg login screen and/or a page with information about the software.

Download a copy of the Accessibility Statement Template as a Word document if you haven't already done so.

Accessing support

Consult with other systems owners on the accessibility-statement slack channel. You can be added to this channel by emailing digacc-support@york.ac.uk.

IT Service Catalogue - requesting new service references

Once your system is up and running, update the information about your product or system on the IT service catalogue.

Fill out the Service ref template Google Doc.
Submit a web request
- For the 'I'd like to select a web request for' dropdown field, select: 'an IT service reference entry'

All services need a service owner.

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. "

- Maya Angelou

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