Who is your website for

Nobody sets out to make a website disabled people cannot use. It happens anyway. We choose a theme, upload a flyer, paste in a link to a form, and never look at the page the way a parent carer with a screen reader does.

This course is 8 short lessons on the 10 things that go wrong most often, and how to put them right. You will not need to touch any code. You will need your website login, a laptop with Chrome or Firefox, and about 10 minutes a day.

Who is reading your website

If your organisation supports children and young people with SEND, your website is read by their families. Think about who that is.

• Disability runs in families. A good share of your readers are dyslexic, autistic, have ADHD, or have a sight or hearing impairment themselves.
• Many are reading on a phone, late at night, after a hard meeting with school. Tired people need clear pages.
• Some are blind and use a screen reader, which reads the page out loud in the order the page is written.
• Some cannot use a mouse and move around the page with the Tab key.
• Some have English as a second language and rely on headings and short sentences to find their way.

Most websites are built as if none of these people exist. Yours serves them on purpose. That is the whole case for this course.

It is the website that disables people

At Pop Pop Studio we work with the social model of disability. People are disabled by the world around them, not by their bodies or their brains. A building with no ramp disables a wheelchair user. A pavement with no tactile paving disables a blind person.

A website does the same. A photo of a poster with no words typed out disables a screen reader user. Pale grey text on white disables someone with low vision. A form with no labels disables anyone who needs help filling it in. None of this is on purpose. All of it is fixable, usually in minutes.

The rules, briefly

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, are the standard everyone uses. They have 3 levels. A is the minimum, AA is what governments expect, and AAA is for sites built for a known group of disabled people. The target for public services in the UK is WCAG 2.2 level AA. The official list of everything in it is How to meet WCAG 2.2 (opens in a new tab). Each lesson in this course ends with a link to the part it covers.

Two laws matter here. The Equality Act 2010 asks any organisation providing a service to the public to make reasonable adjustments for disabled people, and a website is part of the service. The 2018 accessibility regulations for public sector bodies cover councils and schools, and also cover charities that are mostly publicly funded or that provide services aimed at disabled people. If you are a SEND charity, that may well be you. GOV.UK sets this out plainly in Understanding WCAG 2.2 (opens in a new tab).

I will not quote regulations at you again. I mention them once because the person asking you to fix your website is sometimes asking politely for something you have to do anyway.

Progress, not perfection

You do not need to fix everything. Fix the 10 things in this course and your site will be easier to use than most council sites. Then put the checks into how you work, so the next flyer goes up with its words typed out and the next video goes up with captions.

The 10 checks

1. Headings tell the story.
2. Links say where they go.
3. Every image has alt text.
4. No text is trapped in images.
5. Text is big enough and left aligned.
6. Colours have enough contrast.
7. Important information is on a web page, not only in a PDF.
8. Videos have captions.
9. Forms have visible labels.
10. Nothing moves without a pause button.