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Best practice: tips for accessibility

When building your site, it’s important to have accessibility in mind. If you want to reach out to as wide an audience as possible, you need to be inclusive with both the site content and structure. 

Accessibility best practices


Below is a list of some of the things to consider to improve people’s experience and participation on your site:

  • Have clear instructions on how people should navigate the site. Add a call to action to your hero banner and make sure to hyperlink your surveys in your Project Overview tile and news updates. 
  • Make sure to hyperlink every call to action or whenever you mention a different section of the site so people can move around easily e.g. ‘You can find more information in our Documents Library’.
  • Avoid using jargon. If you really have to, make sure to explain technical terms in a way that is easy to understand.
  • Organise your content in a clear, structured way with titles and headers.
  • Summarise your content using bullet points, uploading a pdf of the full report or other document if necessary. Be clear and concise, bearing in mind most people will share their comments via their phones. Use the mobile screen preview in edit mode to gage how much content is enough.
  • Give your hyperlinks unique and descriptive names. Instead of ‘Have your say here’, write ‘Have your say by filling in our Kettering active travel survey’.
  • In the Branding section of your Dashboard, use colours carefully and reach out to your CSM for advice.
  • Don’t add images with text in them as they will not be accessible to screen-readers. Instead, write the content out and add the image below to illustrate your point.
  • Always add alt text to your images (see below). 

This will be read out by the screen-reader, so make sure you are being descriptive e.g. ‘A busy street with many pedestrians and cyclists’ instead of ‘Mare Street’.

  • Think about offline engagement, either via Survey Mode or paper surveys. Please talk to your CSM about the latter and how to best go about it. 

Your CSM will review the site before launch and share their feedback with you about how to make it more accessible and easier to navigate for people. If you have any questions before then, don’t hesitate to get in touch with them and they’ll be happy to help!

Contact Support

If you find you still have some questions or you’re unsure about something, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our dedicated technical Customer Support Team