Cleaning our way to accessibility
Cleaning our way to accessibility
Posted by:
Lammy Jones, Sally Boyes and Adrian Bennett, Posted on: 28 February 2020
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Categories:
Community
Our mission is to make leeds.gov.uk simple and easy to use for all our citizens. Like many local authorities, however, we’ve accumulated vast amounts of website content.
At the start of 2019 we had over 1,500 pages and 9,800 PDFs – anything from strategy reports to event flyers. This is partly because it’s hard to find the time to tidy up. This volume of content creates many problems: important information can be difficult to find using the search tab, and it can easily go out of date.
Spirit of the law
Making all 9,800 PDFs accessible would require extensive training, software, time, and money. But even without those barriers, just making the PDFs accessible doesn’t make the content in them open and easily usable for everyone. For us, compliance is more than a tick box exercise, and designing accessible content is just as important as the code.
We came to the conclusion that we needed to reduce the amount of content we keep [...]