Cabinet Office
This paragraph complements the Guidelines for UK Government websites section 1.12 Procurement. The importance of ensuring that your accessibility requirements and the testing of these requirements have been met and that they are delivered to your specification cannot be over emphasised.
Choosing a supplier: There is no recognised Web ‘contractor’ accreditation system, currently available, so appropriate care needs to be exercised when assessing the competence of suppliers. For example:
Write your accessibility standards and evaluation requirements into your invitations to tender (ITT) and to the specification for use by web developers (internal or external).
The following checklists are to assist you and it is recommended that Checklist A is attached to your project (Internet or Intranet) ITT and specifications and when the project is completed and delivered this is returned to you, together with comments on any non–compliance. This, together with Checklist B will provide you with a compliance audit of the work specified and supplied.
Quicktip
When procuring web services it is inadequate for the designer or developer to simply present colour visuals or mock-ups of the look and feel. It is important these are also presented to you as (X)HTML mark up. When you buy web design you are also buying source coding that will render the visual onto computer screens and the standard of this is the backbone in achieving (X)HTML validation and meeting the mandatory WAI requirements.
This checklist is based on the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v1.0 and is to assist in conforming with our public sector procurement requirement to achieve and sustain WCAG Priorities 1 + 2 checkpoints (Level AA) and our Disability Discrimination Act (Part 3) obligations to provide accessible services. In addition a number of Priority 3 checkpoints are shown as UK Government best practice recommendations.
N/A is to be used only to indicate that an individual checkpoint is not applicable to this web project. For example, if your website does not have any time-based multimedia, then it is appropriate to record N/A.
This template is formed from the ‘evaluation report template’ recommended by W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.
It is based upon our Disability Discrimination Act (Part 3) duty to provide usable services and to assist in conforming to our public sector procurement requirement to achieve and sustain WCAG Priorities 1 + 2 checkpoints (Level AA).
A consistent evaluation report format helps to ensure effective evaluation and accurate comparisons over time. It is therefore recommended that this checklist is attached to ITTs and specifications when planning evaluation of a website under development or when reviewing your existing web presence.
1. Introduction
This report describes the conformance of the [name of organisation] website with the requirements for UK Government websites. The review process is described in …….below and is based on the W3C’s Conformance Evaluation method as described in W3C’s Evaluating Websites for Accessibility.
Based on this evaluation, this website [meets/does not meet/is close to meeting WCAG10 Conformance Level AA]. Detailed review results are available in Section below.
Conformance evaluation of Web accessibility requires a combination of automated evaluation tools and manual evaluation (usability testing of accessibility features) by reviewer(s). The evaluation result of this report is based on evaluation conducted on the following date(s) [0000]. The website may have changed since that time. Additional information on the evaluation process is available in ……..
2. Website reviewed
Name and purpose:
URL (this is generally the homepage URL):
URLs included in review:
URLs excluded:
Date(s) on which conducted:
Natural language(s) of the website, eg, English and/or Welsh
3. Review process
WCAG10 – Level AA which means Priority 1 and Priority 2 checkpoints.
Identify any UK Government best practice (WCAG10 Priority 3 checkpoints) used
Identify evaluation tools used and versions
dentify browser types and versions used
Description of the manual review(s) used
Any additional relevant comments, eg use of metadata, PICS labelling
5. Results and recommendations
6. Reviewer(s)
Names (unless it is agreed they remain anonymous)
Organisation with which reviewer(s) is/are affiliated (unless it is agreed that they remain anonymous)
Contact info
Summary of reviewer(s) experience
This checklist is presented as an alternative to the WCAG checklist and may be used by web producers and managers to ensure that the pages presented on the Internet/Intranet are as accessible and usable as possible to the largest possible audience and, as a minimum, comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 Priority 1 + Priority 2 checkpoints for achieving W3C Web Accessibility Initiative rating ‘AA’.