Guidelines A: Editing a stand-alone website
Advisory
These guidelines do not constitute a formal regulatory procedure. They are provided as a framework and broad outline of the steps needed to achieve regulatory compliance for accessibility.
Guidelines A only applies to stand-alone websites. For a website on a University-supported web editing platform, such as T4 or ELE, you should instead refer to the training provided for that platform.
These guidelines are to be used in conjunction with the stand-alone websites page, and the other guidelines B-G, as applicable.
Overview
If you're editing a stand-alone website and you're not familiar with web code, you'll need help from a web editor to make your site accessibility-compliant if this hasn't been done already.
Please note that the technical support teams don't have capacity to provide accessibility assistance for websites that they haven't commissioned or built. In these cases it's therefore the responsibility of the site owner to ensure that this is provided through other means.
If web accessibility is completely new to you, it's recommended that you read the following to familarise yourself with the background:
How to check your site for compliance
The first step is to establish the current compliancy status of your site. It should have an accessibility statement. A single statement can cover multiple websites, but as stand-alone sites tend to be single bespoke creations, each one typically has its own statement.
If there's no available information relating to the accessibility of your site, refer to steps 3-7 of Guidelines E and arrange for your site to be checked accordingly, to identify and address any accessibility issues that were not considered when it was created.
Ongoing maintenance
Follow the regulations
Once the checks have been completed and the accessibility statement has been published, for ongoing work whoever edits your site should refer to the web accessibility legislation and applicable Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
As mentioned, the editor will need the appropriate skillset to be able to interpret and apply the regulations correctly, as the technical teams do not have capacity to provide accessibility training for independently managed websites, so provision for this should form part of the website's management plan.
Refer to any available platform-specific accessibility guidance
Many platforms have documentation to help their editors to create accessible content. If you don't already have this, it's worth looking into whether it's available for the platform hosting your site.
Bear in mind that even if this guidance is available and it is followed, it doesn't necessarily mean that the site is compliant – that can only be confirmed with a scan and manual check – but it should go some way towards achieving compliance.
Regularly scan and manually check the site for errors
If the site is subject to ongoing edits, there should be a process in place to periodically check the site for accessibility issues that may have been inadvertently introduced. For this, you may find it helpful to refer to the information about web accessibility scanners and scan results.
Monitor for regulation changes
WCAG is updated around once every five years, to keep pace with new technologies. When this happens, UK regulations tend to adopt the new edition as compliance criteria around 12 months later, publicising ahead of time that this is the intention, to give websites time to update.
So the website owner (or designated person) will need to monitor for these changes and provide for the possibility that the website may need an element of redesign as and when this happens.
