Case study brief: Audit testing to create an accessible space
The UK Space Agency (UKSA) plays a major role in delivering the government’s National Space Strategy. This enables the agency to inspire and lead the UK in space, to benefit our planet and its people.
Having 45,000 employees across the country, the UKSA recognised the need to have accessible tools and applications at their disposal. Therefore, they approached our experts in need of robust accessibility audit testing. This testing was performed across their intranet to meet with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) standards and offer best inclusive practices.
Sharepoint templates and extensive documents made this case study unique
The UKSA had a range of internal resources; ranging from SharePoint pages to Power Apps and Bi dashboards.
Sharepoint has locked down templates, these can often cause accessibility issues platform-wide. Intranets are also primarily document heavy, which are notorious for being problematic when it comes to inclusivity. This led our audit testing results to not only form a thorough report, but also provided inclusive document guidance and advice to drive conformity and consistency across the platform.
Web development activities delivered
- Automated and manual audit testing.
- A technical review of the intranet, assessing codebase errors and where ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) could enhance the user experience.
- Accessibility report detailing platform accessibility enhancements, linking to the WCAG criterion.
- Accessibility consultancy with assistive technology demonstrations and inclusive content guidance.
The HeX approach to accessibility audit testing
With every audit that our team undertakes we always perform automated, manual and technical reviews.
Automated scans helped us to detect basic accessibility errors across the UKSA platform. However, many detrimental issues would have been missed without our team performing robust manual reviews. For manual assessments, we used assistive technology to seek out barriers that may have impacted users. This included utilising items such as screen readers, screen magnification, voice activation and keyboard only. These checks allowed our team to analyse how these devices interacted with the platform and assess the user experience. Our expert developers also delved behind the scenes, seeking out code-based errors and making WCAG 2.1 compliance recommendations.
Accessibility audit testing findings
Testing key areas of the internal site, we discovered an array of errors that could affect UKSA employees. In particular, these issues would impact assistive technology users, people with low vision and people who use a keyboard to access the platform.
Common issues included:
- Elements such as navigation, links and articles not having sufficient contrast levels between background colours and text. Also, items such as hover and focus states had low contrast ratios. These would result in users with low vision not being able to read content or know where they are within a page.
- Though mainly the platform was accessible with a keyboard, some areas prevented users from tabbing through elements in a logical order.
- Broken aria labels referenced empty divs or had no content to assist keyboard interactions. Whilst others presented problems for screen reader users by not providing sufficient context for search terms.
- Link text didn’t provide clarity for visually impaired users. Many links read as ‘here’ or ‘click here’ instead of stating the direction where they would navigate to.
- To enhance the user experience we recommended that the page template should have a consistent structure. This will make information easier to find for all users.
- Missing alt text on imagery left blind users or people with low vision missing out on what was being portrayed in pictures, infographics and charts.
- Embedded document widgets stopped keyboard-only users being able to open the files.
- PDF documents were found to be mainly inaccessible.
- Missing slide titles in PowerPoint and Excel spreadsheets with blank, merged, or split cells caused navigational issues in documents.
We combined our audit findings and further recommendations into a comprehensive report. This report detailed the location of the errors and referenced what WCAG success criteria it would fail under. This, along with any advisories that could assist the user-experience for UKSA employees.
Our team always likes to go beyond just providing a report, so we gave a first-hand experience for the team. To help with this, we held online sessions with live assistive technology demonstrations. These demos showed how these errors interacted with varying software and devices. In turn, giving a deeper understanding about the discovered accessibility barriers.
UK Space Agency audit testing impact and results
The UK Space Agency were passionate about seeking out accessibility obstacles on their platform. But more than this, they were dedicated to finding solutions to future-proof the inclusivity of their internal site.
Our team assisted in making an accessible space for all of their workforce to interact with.
We provided expert accessibility consultancy, making suggestions on best inclusive practices. This enabled the UKSA team to give feedback and direction to other staff members responsible for the upkeep of the site. We also created accessible document training resources for the team to use for reference purposes.
Together, our report findings and recommendations will empower the UK Space Agency to both maintain a conformed and consistent intranet into the future.
More case studies about accessibility audit testing
Future PLC
Woman & Home is an award-winning lifestyle magazine, which has been nearly running for an impressive 100 years. TechRadar is an online global publication, which helps up to 30 million people find and use the tech that they love. Working to WCAG 2.2, we made recommendations to make the magazines inclusive for everyone.
Nottingham College
Requiring an accessibility audit to test their site’s compliance, the College approached our team.
HeX provided a six-month one-to-one consultancy contract to assist their web developer in enabling accessible educational resources and course information.