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Public sector organisations need to think about accessibility at every stage and ensure they meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) design principles. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 are now active and applicable to all public sector organisations, including policing, and this guidance has been created to support organisations meeting the requirements for all new and existing websites or applications.

The guidance is split into several sections:

1. Decide how to check the accessibility problems on your website or mobile app
2. Make a plan to fix any accessibility problems
3. Publish your accessibility statement
4. Make sure new features are accessible

The main theme throughout is that accessibility should be considered on how people with impairments to their sight, hearing, movement, memory or thinking may use the website/app. Regular tests should be carried out from the point code writing even through the public beta stage and at every time a new feature is added.

The best way to meet accessibility requirements is to:

• think about accessibility requirements from the commencement

• run accessibility tests regularly throughout development

• get a formal accessibility audit before you go into public beta

• make sure the service works with the most common assistive technologies - screen readers or speech recognition software

• test the service with disabled users and with older users

Legislation link: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/852/contents/made

Open Referral UK is an open data standard in use by Local Government. This standard establishes a consistent way of publishing and describing information for councils, to ensure the data is effectively used and shared for the benefit of local communities and services (https://www.localdigital.gov.uk/)

Open Document Formats (ODF) 1.2 standard was selected by the Open Standards Board for use across the UK government. ODF works on most operating systems (including desktops, laptops, mobiles and tablets). This is because it is an open standards that allows suppliers to create interoperable office productivity solutions, can lower IT costs as ODF is low cost or free to use, allows government staff to share and edit documents, allows stricter security checks therefore helping it to prevent common cyber-attack scenarios, can add digital signatures to a document. 

ODF standard works with several software tools as Mac, Windows, Linux, and Android operating systems as well as many others. User needs are very important when selecting an ODF complaint solution, therefore the research and analysis is critical.

The standard also includes the following information:

• Buying ODF compliant solutions

• Migrating to ODF compliant solutions

• Securing ODF compliant solutions

• Integrating ODF compliant solutions

• Setting up ODF complaint solutions

All public services sending emails out on behalf of government organisations must follow all protocols, processes and guidelines to ensure that they secure their email service. This includes:

• the service providing users with mailbox access

• internal relays and gateways

• email filtering services

• third party services that send email on your behalf, like transactional email services

Key configurations are needed to ensure you email services run smoothly:

• Transport Layer Security (TLS)

• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)

• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC)

• Public Domain Name System (DNS)

• Ability to make administrative changes

If there are any changes made to your email security, ensure that you communicate such changes to all staff in your organisation.

There is a need under the Equality Act 2010 to ensure documents are readily available to users who have additional accessibility needs. This document explains how to publish accessible documents to meet the needs of all users under the accessibility regulations.

It covers:

• Writing accessible documents
• Making non-HTML documents accessible
• Creating a PDF/A for archiving purposes
  • To save a PDF/A in Word, click Save As, change Save as type to PDF, click Options and tick 'PDF/A compliant'

The authors and National Standards Assurance Board accept that there is still a place for PDF documents, especially for archival purposes, but to ensure they are accessible in the future, they should be stored as PDF/A not the normal PDF format.

[Added September 2021]