11 August 2023

CNWL wants as many people as possible to be able to use our website

This month, we completed an audit of our website to maintain compliance with accessibility guidelines and make improvements, in accordance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.1 AA standard.

As part of the review, the Trust updated its Cookie disclaimer to reflect best practice. The new cookie notice asks anyone visiting the site if they want to ‘deny additional cookies’ to protect data. 

The last full accessibility audit of the site was in March 2020 when the site was newly built and fully compliant with the AA standard. 

The latest audit, carried out by Frank Design Ltd,  checked that we continue to meet the standards

Anyone visiting the site can:

  • change colours, contrast levels and fonts
  • zoom in up to 300% without the text spilling off the screen
  • navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader (including the most recent versions of JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver)

Located at the bottom of every page is our accessibility toolbar, labelled 'show accessibility tools'. Click on the toolbar to toggle various accessible options, including:

  • Text size
  • Contrast
  • Google translate. (We cannot guarantee the accuracy of the translation)

Images on our website have alternative text attributes (alt text). This means when an image is used on a webpage to convey information its content is also described in the alt text. Therefore, the image can be understood by text browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers. If an image is used for simply decorative purposes, the text attribute for the image is left empty in line with accepted best practice.

Some of the changes we’ve made this month include improved colour contrast of text over images for readability and a dynamic search bar so that screen-readers can detect and read out search terms.

PDFs and other documents

There is one area where we fail the guidelines at this time. This is the guidelines for PDFs. When a PDF is displayed in a browser at the moment the title may not always display in the top title bar or as the tab name (WCAG 2.4.2 Page titled )

As much as possible we try to avoid use of PDFs and add content to pages directly. But some of our PDFs are service leaflets where the content is usually on the webpage too.  

We welcome your feedback. 

If you find any problems using the website please tell us. Contact: communications.cnwl@nhs.net and let us know as much detail of the issue as possible and a link to the page.