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Accessibility guidance for external organisations

It’s important that our sites work for everyone. Making our sites accessible means that they can be used by as many people as possible.

This includes those with:

  • Impaired vision
  • Motor difficulties
  • Cognitive impairments or learning difficulties
  • Deafness or impaired hearing

Any document that gets added to our sites must be accessible. As well as being the right thing to do, legally, all our sites must meet the WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines to Level AA standard. This includes any document we upload.

This page contains some help and support if you need to produce a document to be added to one of our websites.

Accessibility advice is also available from GOV.UK.

Tips for making your document accessible

SCULPT is an acronym of the six simple things to make your documents meet basic accessibility requirements. SCULPT stands for Structure, Colour and contrast, Use of images, Links, Page layout and Table structure. 

Structure

  • Use heading styles (heading 1 for the document title, heading 2 for the first heading level, heading 3 for the next heading level and so on) to create a structure, so users can easily navigate through your document

Colour and contrast

  • Make sure there's enough contrast between background and foreground
  • Avoid using colour as the only way to communicate something

Use of images

  • Add alt text descriptions
  • If using charts or graphs, consider providing a text alternative

Links

  • Rather than pasting long URLs, hyperlink descriptive link text

Page layout 

  • Never justify your text - always left align it 
  • Use headings to separate long paragraphs of text

Table structure

  • Avoid merging or splitting cells
  • Set the header row, running along the top

Documents produced in Microsoft Word

  • Run an accessibility check (assuming you're on Office 365, with the Word document opened, go to the 'Review' tab and select 'Check accessibility')
  • Then correct any issues that the accessibility checker identifies. Microsoft's accessibility checker isn't able to identify every issue, so please also carry out a manual check, looking for any issues such as colour contrast or complicated tables.
  • To help you make the accessibility fixes, follow the SCULPT tips in the section above.

Further reading

Documents produced using professional design software

Useful information when producing documents

Check a PDF for accessibility

You can pick up many accessibility issues by running some automated tests on your document. There are some free online checkers, such as   PAVE.

You’ll also need to do manual testing to check your document fully meets accessibility standards. Use the  accessibility checklist created by 18F  (the US government’s digital agency) to help you with your manual testing.

Adobe Acrobat Pro users

Follow Adobe’s instructions on  using Acrobat Pro to check if your PDF is accessible .

The PDF should pass the full check for WCAG Level AA without any warnings.

Web standards

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