Website monitoring
Review by the Cabinet Office- Central Digital & Data Office 5th January 2022
What the Central Digital & Data Office, part of the Cabinet Office found when they monitored our site
Central Digital & Data Office reviewed Redbridge Council website to monitor accessibility which was chosen from a random sample to be monitored.
It is a requirement of The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 <https://gov.uk/accessibility-regulations> that public sector websites are accessible to everyone. This came into force on 23 September 2018.
What they found and what we have done to make the site more accessible
Central Digital & Data Office found some accessibility issues with the website:
In order to focus limited resource available when testing the pages on our site(s) for accessibility and compliance with WCAG 2.1 levels A and AA we ensured that at least one page of each type was assessed. These types were:
- The home page
- A landing page
- A general content page
- A news story
- An event
- A blog post
- A simple eform
- A search results page
- Each online application and transaction
In particular pages highlighted by the Cabinet Office Review were re-assessed as examples of pages where improvement was required.
A number of tests, both automated and manual, were performed for each selected page:
- An automated assessment conducted by Sitemorse
- An automated check using Axe
- Manually navigating the page using a keyboard
- Zooming the page to 400%
- Use of a screen reader
What we have done to support this work
Documents
As of January 2022, there were 713 documents on redbridge.gov.uk published since 23 September 2018 (within scope of the No. 2 Regulations). Focusing on fixing the top 10% most viewed documents is equivalent to about 71 documents.
Of these 713
- 37 documents (5%) have been viewed more than 1000 times
- 26 documents (4%) have been viewed between 500 and 1000 times
- 126 documents (18%) have been viewed between 100 and 500 times
- 209 documents (29%) have been viewed between 10 and 100 times
We have fixed the most viewed documents on redbridge.gov.uk (top 10%) and ensuring that new documents are accessible where they are required for essential services or used by people with disabilities.
Our council minutes hosted on moderngov.redbridge.gov.uk are not all accessible but from May 2022 all pdfs will be made accessible with the language selected to help the user. In the meantime any older minutes can be requested in a format that the user may require and can contact us through customer email.
Our Election notice of statements may not all be accessible due to these being provided by an external source and a statutory limitation to amendments, we will continue to monitor these.
We have carried out basic accessibility checks on the London Borough of Redbridge website that are independent of www.redbridge.gov.uk. These basic checks will be carried out by the IT development team, Web content team and service area web authors responsible for the website using GOV.UK's guidance on doing a basic check and our own internally produced guidance.
Services will check samples of content, which will include:
- their homepage
- content pages that are mostly text based
- images, video and audio content
- interactive tools and transactions, like forms
- pages including login functionality, if the website has them
- PDFs and other document types they have
- dynamic content like pop-up windows
- navigation pages, including their sitemap and pages with search functionality
