Why accessibility matters

Making a website accessible means making sure it can be used by as many people as possible. This includes those with:

  • impaired vision
  • motor difficulties
  • cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
  • deafness or impaired hearing

Why making public sector websites accessible is important

People may not have a choice when using a public sector website or app, so it’s important they work for everyone. The people who need them the most are often the people who find them hardest to use.

Accessible websites also tend to work better for everyone. For example, they are often faster and easier to use and tend to appear higher in search engine rankings.

New regulations in force in 2020

New regulations for the public sector have been put in place and from January 2020 the Government Digital Service (GDS) will monitor public sector bodies’ compliance on behalf of the Minister for the Cabinet Office. Find out more from GDS.

The regulations also apply to documents that we publish on our website. If you are considering publishing a document on the council website, you will need to make it accessible before we can publish it. Read more about accessible documents.

What we do

liverpool.gov.uk aims to follow best-practice accessibility guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and they have been further enhanced through feedback from user testing by people who use assistive technologies.

We aim to ensure that the pages on the site meet the checkpoints of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Applications running on liverpool.gov.uk should also meet these checkpoints.

Assistive technologies

Applications running on liverpool.gov.uk should be usable in recent versions of these assistive technologies:

  • JAWS - a screen reader for Windows
  • ZoomText - a screen magnifier for Windows
  • Dragon - a speech recognition tool for Windows and Mac
  • NVDA - a screen reader for Windows, free and open source
  • VoiceOver - a screen reader which comes as standard with Mac/iOS
  • ReciteMe - innovative cloud based web accessibility solution

Applications running on liverpool.gov.uk should also be usable in basic operating system screen magnifiers like ZoomText and MAGic.