The Government Digital Service has started addressing accessibility issues with PDFs on GOV.UK following a survey of assistive technology users.
The survey showed some people strugged with PDFs on GOV.UK – Photo credit: Flickr, Till Westermayer, CC BY-SA 2.0
Digital accessibility champion Chris Moore said that the team was planning to carry out more user research on accessibility across the sites, as the 2016 GOV.UK survey identified areas users struggle with, as well as the technologies that are most popular with users.
The survey, which received more than 700 responses, aimed to identify the types of assistive technologies people used, as well as allowing respondents to feedback more generally about accessibility on GOV.UK.
Moore said that a “significant number” said that, overall, they were happy with the service provided, but that the survey raised issues in a number of areas.
These included difficulties in using PDFs – respondents asked for content to be made available in HTML instead – and in reading the black text on the white background.
Related content
Mobile accessibility lags behind desktop, says Socitm survey of council websites
‘It’s cheaper, democratic and what users want’: Why councils need to think about accessibility
Bridging the UK Digital Skills Gap in the Public Sector
The survey also found there were usability issues with the site’s ‘start now’ pages. Moore said this was because the things you need to know before you start appear after the ‘start now’ button, which be missed by screen reader and screen magnification users.
In addition, Moore said that several users had difficulties with the search results page, saying that it was too complicated, with too many options to navigate.
“Users felt that the interface should be cleaner to easily find the search results with perhaps an option to display advanced features for those who need more granularity when filtering,” he wrote.
When asked what assistive technologies they used, 30% of GOV.UK users said they used a screen magnifier, while 29% used a screen reader.
Of those who used a magnifier, 38% used one with screen reader capabilities, with ZoomText being the most commonly used in both categories.
For those with screenreaders, JAWS was the most popular, followed by VoiceOver.
Meanwhile, a total of 18% of respondents said they used some kind of speech recognition technology and 15% saying they used readability technology.
The most popular of the readability technologies was Read and Write, which is aimed at people with dyslexia.
Moore said that the survey results would help decide which assistive technologies the team would use to test GOV.UK and what technologies they would advise other departments to test with.
