Accessibility support for statistical and analytical publications

If you work in the public sector and you publish content online, you might have heard a bit about accessibility. It is a legal requirement for all content published on public sector websites to meet certain accessibility criteria.

Help is available

Guidance and support is available to help you make your content accessible.

Guidance

There are several articles and other resources that you might find useful, including:

• Accessibility legislation: what you need to know
• Making analytical publications accessible
• Releasing statistics in spreadsheets
• Using symbols and shorthand in tables
• How to make a spreadsheet accessible: a demonstration
• Data visualisation: colours (more data visualisation guidance updated with information on the accessibility legislation is in development)

Support

Support with accessibility for statistics and analysis

You can access support to help you make your statistics and analysis more accessible. Support includes:

• the Accessibility for Statistics Basecamp – this is an online tool that has a message board and other functions where you can ask questions about accessibility
• accessibility drop-in clinics for the Analysis Function – these will be advertised on the GSS website events page, the Analysis Function events page and the Accessibility for Statistics Basecamp

General accessibility support

There is plenty of support available to help you with more general questions about accessibility. For example:

• the UK Government Digital Slack has a channel for accessibility
• the Basecamp for the Cross-government Content Community is a good place to ask accessibility questions
• the cross-government accessibility community is also a good place to go for help.

Accessibility empathy

If you want a better understanding of access needs, these are some resources you might find useful:

• Accessibility empathy for users of spreadsheets (blog post)
• Empathy prompts website
• Accessibility personas from the Government Digital Service
• Accessibility posters from Home Office

Future work

We are reviewing our guidance to incorporate the accessibility legislation. We’re reviewing guidance about:

• data visualisation: tables and charts
• data visualisation: infographics
• writing about statistics

We always welcome feedback on our guidance, please use the feedback forms on the guidance pages to let us know what you think!