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Helping businesses to be more accessible and inclusive of disabled people

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    Accessibility resources toolkit Chapter 1

    Getting started with accessible content and inclusive design

    What you will learn in this chapter

    • Where to find to legal guidelines and standards
    • Considerations for compliance versus accessibility
    • Inclusion culture
    • General accessibility resources

    Here’s some essential information your organisation needs to get started with accessibility.

    Legal standards

    Start with the legal standards your website must meet. In the UK, this is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG). The AA standard is the legal minimum.

    Meeting WCAG criteria will help make sure your site is more accessible. And it will make you compliant.

    Being compliant is an important first step.

    Compliance does not always mean accessible

    However, meeting WCAG does not automatically mean you’re ‘fully accessible’. You may still create accessibility barriers for a range of disabled people through:

    • your content
    • your user journey
    • your usability

    Research and testing with disabled people will make sure that you are constantly:

    • improving accessibility
    • meeting the actual needs of your disabled customers

    Doing research and understanding barriers chapter

    Include accessibility in your processes and culture

    It’s important to build accessibility into your processes for:

    • content creation
    • design
    • development

    There are a range of resources to help everyone in your organisation upskill. And understand how to make their work accessible, both for customers and colleagues.

    Microsoft products, like Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint have built-in accessibility checkers. These can help you with documents.

    Some organisations may not have these features automatically enabled or available. In this case, you may need to speak to IT support to make sure they are.

    It will help everyone in your organisation improve the accessibility of the work. Both for customers and colleagues. Many disabled people do not tell their employer or organisation about being disabled. It’s better to be accessible in everything you do, not just for your customers or clients.

    Getting started with accessibility in your organisation chapter

    General accessibility resources

    Here are some sites with general accessibility guidance. The rest of the toolkit includes resources specific to the type of content you’re working on.

    Partner with us

    We believe partnerships can help us build a more inclusive and accessible society. One where disabled people experience equality and fairness.

    To do this, we partner with organisations to work on larger strategic goals together. For wider social change. For their customers. For their clients. For their employees.

    Partner with Scope