LONDON: To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the NHS, Sitemorse is running a landmark review of digital accessibility compliance in the UK public health sector.
The Sitemorse NHS70 Accessibility Index will cover over 600 NHS websites, scoring and ranking them based on accessibility compliance.
All NHS websites have legally needed to meet WCAG 2.0 AA standards since August 2016. Given this, we feel that it is important to help NHS organisations to understand the current state of play regarding accessibility – especially as many don't know where they stand. The Accessibility Index will provide NHS site managers and editors with a clear understanding of how well they are doing and how close they are to accessibility compliance. The Accessibility Index will also flag the kind of issues that need to be addressed in order to improve performance.
This will become even more important with the EU public sector accessibility directive (European standard EN 301 549 V1.1.2 (2015-04)) coming into force in September. The directive calls for sites to be "perceivable, operable, understandable and robust" (following the WCAG 2.0 AA rating terminology) and requires public sector bodies to demonstrate that they are compliant, to resolve issues and to track their compliance.
Lawrence Shaw, CEO of Sitemorse, said: "The NHS is a British national treasure and it's fantastic to be celebrating the institution's 70th anniversary. At Sitemorse, we help clients like NHS Digital to achieve digital compliance and to meet legal accessibility requirements through automated assessment. Accessibility compliance benefits all users, but in healthcare it is of critical importance to ensure that all individuals can access the services on offer.
"Digital managers often fear that improving accessibility compliance will be an excessively onerous task, but we aim to make it simple. Our prioritised reporting identifies the most urgent issues so major changes can be made fast – and without the chore of dealing with endless reporting.
The Accessibility Index will run in the second half of July 2018, with the results to be announced soon after.
To get the Sitemorse NHS70 Accessibility Index results, visit www.sitemorse.com/nhs70.
Sitemorse (www.sitemorse.com) helps organisations drive improved user experience, ensuring that content is always optimised and compliance requirements are always met. The London-based, privately-owned company has now been leading the field of Digital Governance for over 15 years.