U.K. Digital Accessibility Survey Reviews the Last 5 Years with Results that Impact All Markets
Accessibility expert consultant, Alistair McNaught, has recently conducted a short, reflective survey in the U.K. to assess the impact of 2018 accessibility legislation for public sector bodies. We are pleased to cross-post Alistair’s overview of this work and encourage all our readers to find takeaways for their region as there are plenty!
Highlights include:
- Although awareness has been slow to grow the sector is near a tipping point. If your workflows and outputs still lack accessibility, now is the time to prioritise improvement,
- University Presses in particular, and academic publishers in general, have a key role to lead by ensuring their guidance for authors references core accessibility practises. When accessibility is as much about research and publication as it is about teaching and learning it will gain significantly more traction amongst academics.
- Now might be a good time for publishers to check that the quality of their accessibility statements is up to scratch. Although we’ve had excellent responses from platform providers, there are many publishers whose accessibility statement had a very low Aspire score in 2018 and, to our knowledge, nothing has changed. Now that some of the publishers are achieving Aspire Gold badges, having a score of 20% makes you stand out for entirely the wrong reasons!
The overview that Alistair has put together directs the reader to some more in-depth topics and these are fascinating:
Alistair McNaught has worked nationally in digital accessibility since 2004. He has broad experience across further education, skills, adult learning and higher education. He has researched, written and presented extensively on digital accessibility.