(Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.)

The accessibility regulations came into force for public sector bodies on 23 September 2018. The regulations say you must make your website more accessible by making it ‘perceivable, operable, understandable and robust’.
We need to include and update an accessibility statement on your website.

Making a website  accessible means making sure it can be used by as many people as possible.
This includes those with:

• impaired vision
• motor difficulties
• cognitive impairments or learning disabilities
• deafness or impaired hearing

However we can  declare that making particular things accessible is a disproportionate burden, but we are legally required to carry out an assessment. In that assessment we weigh up, roughly speaking:

• the burden that making those things accessible places on your organisation
• the benefits of making those things accessible

When making our assessment, we need to consider:-

• our organisation’s size and resources
• the nature of our organisation (for example, do you have services aimed at people who are likely to have a disability?)
• how much making things accessible would cost and the impact that would have on our organisation
• how much disabled users would benefit from us making things accessible
• We might judge that the benefits of making some things accessible would not justify the cost to our organisation. In that case, we can claim it would not be reasonable for us to make those things accessible because it’s a disproportionate burden.