Starting Our Web Accessibility Journey

We don’t always get things right.

When we refreshed our website in February 2024, we wanted to encourage more people to engage with our vision for Manchester’s digital future. Our redesign focused on improving navigability, clarity of information, and visual appeal to improve the overall experience of users curious to learn more about the Strategy.

In many ways, our relaunch has been a success. Last month, over 15,000 people visited our Strategy site; this time last year, the figure was under 800. Compare the before and after, and you’ll notice less clutter, better readability and a more intuitive layout. Through growing the website’s reach and appeal, we’ve been able to advocate for our values on a wider scale and champion the causes we care about.

It's not enough.

In the UK, over 16 million people live with a disability. When websites fail to prioritise accessibility in their design, a large portion of our community are excluded from accessing the same opportunities, services, and resources that benefit others.

While our website refresh had helped us to tell the stories of Manchester’s tech ecosystem more effectively, disabled and neurodiverse users were still encountering challenges when navigating our site.

How well we navigate the online world directly influences our ability to participate in the world around us, impacting our access to education, information, communication and vital services. Overlooking accessibility in website design can exacerbate existing inequalities by creating more barriers for disabled users to access what they need online.

Our Strategy includes, and impacts, everyone in our city. As digital becomes more deeply embedded in our everyday lives, interweaving with almost all aspects of society, advocating for inclusive approaches to adoption has become a moral responsibility. We believe in championing equitable, ethical, and sustainable approaches to digital and technology that centre human values and need.

To put our principles into practice, we needed to ensure our website was fully accessible to everyone in Manchester.

As a small team of four, we’re always ready to ask for help – especially where our web design expertise has reached its limit! To help us identify the areas of the Digital Strategy site that presented the most challenges for neurodiverse and disabled users, we reached out to human-centred design experts Nexer Digital for a comprehensive accessibility audit. With the benefit of Nexer’s expertise, we could feel confident that any changes we made to the site would be purposeful, impactful, and supported by evidence.

The last two months have been an eye-opening experience. Without a technical background, or dedicated web team, understanding web content accessibility guidelines can be challenging. Judging which changes are needed and how to implement them practically can be even more difficult, even with a good understanding of requirements.

Guided by Nexer’s incredible accessibility experts, we’ve been able to pinpoint the areas of the site most likely to cause frustration for users, and define the actions needed to resolve them. Most importantly, our work with Nexer has enriched our knowledge of how and why specific elements of website design can impact disabled and neurodiverse users, empowering us to make more inclusive design choices going forward.

The spectrum of disability is broad, encompassing a diverse range of conflicting needs. The goal of web accessibility isn’t to achieve perfection, but to improve the online experience by removing barriers for as many users as possible. Each small change can represent progress – and a step in the right direction.

By sharing our accessibility journey, we want to encourage more people in Manchester to build their confidence to start thinking about inclusivity in web design. Here are five simple site adjustments that don’t require technical expertise to implement. Over the next six months, we’ll be implementing these changes (and more!) as part of a wider website refresh.

We’re committed to taking our first steps towards more equitable design – and you can too.

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Make Links Clear

While links on our site are clear in context, they often don’t make sense in isolation. This can be confusing for people who use assistive technology, who usually navigate pages using link text alone. On our events page, this might mean hearing “see event” twenty times in quick succession!

To help more people to easily explore the Digital Strategy site, we’re adapting our link text to be clear without surrounding context so that people can confidently know where they are being directed. You’ll no longer hear “learn more” on our about us page; we’ve adapted our links to be clear on exactly who you’ll be learning more about!

Add Alt Text

Alt text is vital to help people with sight loss access the same images that sighted people enjoy. Writing alt text should be a given for any website using images – but we can’t yet claim to be getting this perfectly right. Over the years, a wide range of people have contributed to our Digital Strategy site, with varying degrees of expertise in accessibility. While alt text has been added in some parts, it has been overlooked in others.

We’re not only applying alt text more consistently across our site to ensure that all visitors can access the same content, but sharing best practice within our team to help us adopt a more unified approach to web accessibility.

Reduce Text in Images

When text is incorporated into an image, alt text becomes even more crucial to convey the information to all users. Screen readers cannot interpret text in images, and text within images cannot be resized or recoloured for better visibility. In fact, it’s often better to avoid using text in images wherever possible.

In our blogs, we often use graphics to make the content we share more engaging ways. While we’ve already made sure that our existing images containing text have appropriately descriptive alt text, we’re in the process of exploring other creative ways to present information that does not exclude any part of our community.

Create a Sitemap

We’d already done a lot to improve the navigability of our site in our refresh last year, but still discovered some pages hidden away! Alongside the parts of our site that were inaccessible from the main menu, we hadn’t fully accounted for different user preferences. Offering multiple ways for users to access content can help people to explore websites in ways that are comfortable for them.

As a first step towards making our site more accessible, we’ve added a comprehensive sitemap. By offering an organised view of our site’s structure, the sitemap helps visitors to more easily explore to locate the content they’re looking for – without relying on page elements that could create barriers to access.

Pay Attention to Colour Contrast

Our Digital Strategy sets out a vision for Manchester’s digital future that’s bold, vibrant and exciting. Our branding reflects these ambitions. We could never be accused of failing to catch the eye – look around our website and you’ll be met with an unapologetic explosion of colour.

Designing an accessible website doesn’t mean compromising on visual style. Improving colour contrast can help more users to explore a website, without experiencing frustration. By thinking outside the box and integrating more accessible colour combinations, we can stay true to the values our visual identity represents while making it easier for more people to use our site.

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Everyone in Manchester, regardless of background or ability, should be able to access the online world in ways that make sense to them. While we may not always get things right, we’ll continue to embrace opportunities for learning and growth. Through adapting our website to be more inclusive of different needs, we aim to embed accessibility into our processes to more meaningfully embody the values we espouse.

We’re excited to get stuck in!