Business Region Skåne - An accessibility adapted website

Background

Until recently, it has been up to each company with a website to decide for themselves whether accessibility is something they want to adapt for or not. For public activities such as state and municipal authorities, but also for private actors with community-supporting function such as school and care, conditions have already changed. All new websites built after September 22nd, 2019 must already be adapted and, as of autumn 23rd September 2020, all old websites must also be accessible. Next in turn will be all web applications that need to be adjusted by June 23rd, 2021.

In order to fulfill accessibility requirements as a public organization, websites and later web applications must achieve class AA in the WCAG 2.1 directives. An accessible website can help people with all kinds of disabilities; physical like visual impairment as well as cognitive like dyslexia.

But accessibility adjustments are not just a matter of public activity. One can see that websites that use accessibility-friendly web technologies take advantage of organic search on the major search engines like Google. In other words, it can be a profitable investment that can bring great benefits compared to competitors.

The mission

Business Region Skåne was in need of bringing together five brands in one platform in a cost-effective way, but at the same time allowed each company to communicate and look their own way. Odd Hill was hired for the mission and in February 2019 launched a so-called multi-site, several seemingly different websites but based on the same installation and code base.

Part of the mission already at the launch in 2019 was to build an accessibility-adapted website according to the requirements that existed then, WCAG 2.0 AA.

In the fall of 2019, an analysis was made of the platform to see what measures were required to live up to the updated directives in WCAG 2.1 AA. Odd Hill also received this assignment and in the spring of 2020 the updated available platform was launched.

Websites that we have accessibility adapted to the installation:

Business Region Skåne

Invest in Skåne

Event in Skåne

Film i Skåne

Tourism in Skåne

What we did

When making an accessibility friendly website, there are many things to consider; code-wise, structural and editorial. Here is a selection of the problems that were addressed:

• Improved semantics - it should be clear to those who use a screen reader to understand what different buttons and choices mean
• There must be at least two ways for the visitor to navigate the page structure, eg via menu, search function, sitemap, A-Z list or tag cloud.
• All functions should be possible to manage via a keyboard
• Clarify what are links in more than one way. It is not enough to just mark out links with a color if someone who is color blind should perceive it.
• Alternative texts on pictures so that even those who cannot see should understand what the picture contains.
• Use headings with hierarchical structural order that make it clear and easy to navigate among the content of a page.
• Good readability, ie by avoiding italics.
• Mark fields in forms in the code so that users who use screen readers understand how to fill in the fields.

Do you need an accessibility-friendly website?

Odd Hill has helped many customers to accessibility their websites. You will find even more information on the subject in this article (in swedish). 

We at Odd Hill can help you analyze and write a report on the measures that need to be resolved on your particular website. If you have already received a report, our developers can help you customize the site according to the recommended actions. If you are a public organisation, we will be happy to help you write the accessibility report that is required and outline what measures you have taken to meet the accessibility requirements.