(7 minute read)
Published: 31 May 2024
Written by: Stephanie Santiano, Grants Manager and Bernie McShane, Executive Assistant (maternity leave cover)
This update explores what we learned in the process of making our website more accessible. This was something we began to think about more deeply a couple of years ago as a result of the Foundation Practice Rating (FPR). The FPR is a rating system that assesses the practices of UK-based trusts and foundations around diversity, accountability and transparency. Here at John Ellerman Foundation, we understand that working towards equitable practices is an ongoing journey, rather than a finite destination.
We are pleased to have received an overall A rating in the FPR in both 2023 and 2024. In response to last year’s FPR results, we committed to three actions for 2023/24. We set up a publicly available Complaints Policy and completed our second independently-run perception audit with our grant-holders and applicants. The third action was to complete an externally-commissioned accessibility audit of our website.
But first we thought it might be interesting to tell you a little about our own relationship with websites. Stephanie’s career began in 2016, and she has been accessing websites online since the early 2000s – rarely experiencing any issues in doing so! Bernie has spent almost forty years working in Executive Assistant, administration and business support roles in both the private sector and public sector, before joining us as our maternity leave cover for the Executive Assistant role from November 2023 to May 2024. In the 1980s, Bernie was using technology that was basic and her first experience of working somewhere that had a company website was Unilever in the late 1990s. In fact, it was at Unilever, that Bernie learned, to her surprise and via a rigorous medical, that she had an accessibility issue, resulting in her wearing a hearing aid. Bernie’s disability means that she feels more aware of the stress that people can sometimes experience when navigating documentation and websites that can be unsuitable to their requirements. When preparing for her interview at the Foundation, she reviewed our website and found it engaging and accessible.
In a world where our personal and business interactions are increasingly online, it is easy to take access to the web for granted. But the word access is experienced in so many ways by all of us!
Our first attempt at making our website more accessible was to use an overlay tool to improve the accessibility of our website. However, given that most of our team do not identify as disabled, we recognised that we may not have the full direct knowledge or experience to understand the barriers that people with a broad range of disabilities might experience when using websites. That’s why we decided to commission an expert organisation to complete an audit of our website in order to support us to identify the accessibility issues on our website.
Whilst everyone we met with could speak to their expertise in technical elements of website design, we were most impressed by organisations that could offer technical knowledge while also demonstrating that their work was led by Disabled People. Ultimately, we chose to work with an organisation led by people with direct experience, and in September 2023, our external auditor completed a full audit of our website.
The audit was completed using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) as a benchmark. The WCAG is an international standard related to the accessibility of web content. WCAG recommendations can support people and organisations to work towards making their websites more accessible for Disabled People.
The audit uncovered a range of areas where our website failed to adhere to WCAG criteria. While we were disappointed at this result, our auditor was helpful in offering us clear details on how to rectify the issues identified. We also had the support of our web developers to address the issues.
For example, the overlay tool to improve the accessibility of our website was actually making our website more difficult for some Disabled People, as the tool clashed with the accessibility software that users would have installed on their own devices. The solution to this issue was relatively straightforward. We just had to ask our web developers to remove the tool from our website.
The audit identified other issues that were easy to resolve and would make a big difference such as ensuring all our hyperlinks work correctly, describing hyperlinks more clearly, describing images on the website rather than just noting the copyright information, and reducing the use of bold and italics text, making our sentences more concise. We have worked through making changes like this as a small working group of three over the last few weeks.
Other changes were more technical though, and beyond our own internal capabilities with the back end of our website, and so we needed help from our website developers. For instance, the audit identified that we should create a contact form on our website instead of listing an email address that people can write to. This would mean that people visiting our website can send us a message without having to access a separate platform to write an email. We were surprised that this was something that we hadn’t thought of, but once it was pointed out to us, it seemed so obvious.
At other times, Stephanie found it challenging to articulate what the exact issue was to the web developers. On one occasion, she found it awkward to explain why we wanted information displayed in a cascading style sheet, instead of as a table. She understood that using a table affected the effectiveness of screen readers, but she didn’t fully understand what a ‘cascading style sheet’ was or how it was different from a table. Fortunately, when she went back to our accessibility auditor to ask for their help, they gave a detailed technical response which our web developers understood clearly. Moments like this highlighted to us the importance of engaging with experts who can support us with areas outside the realm of our knowledge. We also needed our web developers to ensure that the website can be used with screen-reader technology and that text can be enlarged and colour contrasting is possible, and that the links to our live social media feeds work properly.
Through our in-house work and with the support of our web designers, we have resolved most of the issues identified in our audit. Our current Accessibility Statement reflects unresolved issues that we are aware of and are committed to rectifying – namely the need to improve the accessibility of PDF documents on our websites (including this one!).
While we have learned a lot through this process, we understand that this area remains a work in progress. It’s why the title of our article says ‘more accessible’, because we know it will always be an ongoing area of work to ensure that our website is as accessible as possible. Working towards equitable practice means being willing to continuously reflect on what we can do better.
The recommendations from our accessibility auditor offered us a deeper understanding of the barriers that web users with disabilities can face when accessing the Internet. We were grateful to have the opportunity to get involved with updating the accessibility of our website because we know that through this work, the aims and objectives of John Ellerman Foundation’s philanthropic work can reach a wider and more diverse audience, offering a more enriching and useful experience for those who use our website. We hope that sharing our learning encourages others to consider their own websites and reflect on how they can improve accessibility for all.