The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 require public sector bodies to make their websites and digital content meet accessibility standards. These standards aim to ensure information is accessible to people with visual impairments, hearing difficulties, motor conditions, and mental differences.

These regulations are important because the group of people who might need accessible websites is also the group that SENCO teams should be supporting. As a result, SENCO teams should be very aware of how the website and digital content should be accessible to the family.

Readable Content

The layout of the content can affect people as much as the software they are using. There are many different tools and assistive technologies that people with dyslexia or mental processing differences can use to make text more readable. Using short paragraphs and clear headings is a good starting point. Using plain language is also a good practice. Plain language means that the text should be understandable by a person who does not have a university education. This means having clear and concise headings, using simple language, and providing definitions for complex language and concepts. This is sometimes described as ‘Level 1 English’ or ‘Year 7 English’.

Clear Navigation

Clear navigation is also needed. The layout and structure of the content should ensure that it is easy for users to find what they are looking for. The content should not contain images of text, and if it does, then alt text should be available. For Websites for schools, contact https://www.fsedesign.co.uk/websites-for-schools

Documents

Schools produce a lot of documents in digital format: policies, letters, prospectuses, term date documents, etc. Many of these are PDFs. If PDFs are used, then making sure that they are as accessible as possible is important. Documents produced as scanned images will not be accessible to people who use screen readers. These documents will produce either garbled output or silence, which is not helpful! This also includes the admissions policy, which should be available in accessible HTML and any other PDFs that are produced.

Videos

There is a growing need for schools to produce accessible videos. These might include a headteacher welcome video, virtual tour, school production, etc. These can be very inaccessible to people who have hearing impairments. If there are no captions or text tracks, then this excludes the group that you are trying to communicate with. Many video platforms, such as YouTube, have automatic captioning tools. This does not mean that captions do not need to be considered, just that there are some automatic processes involved. However, this is no reason not to provide captions as a key part of video production.