Guidance and Tools for Digital Accessibility
Summary
The UK Central Digital and Data Office and Government Digital Service have published guidance to help public sector bodies meet accessibility regulations. The guidance covers leading accessibility teams, making websites and apps accessible, monitoring compliance, and designing inclusive services. Resources include links to WCAG principles, GOV.UK Design System components, and assistive technology testing guidance.
What changed
The Central Digital and Data Office and Government Digital Service issued comprehensive guidance on meeting the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations. The guidance provides resources organized by role: team leaders responsible for website accessibility, teams making accessibility changes, and those monitoring compliance. Key resources include the WCAG guidelines, accessibility requirements for public sector websites and apps, and GDS monitoring processes.
Public sector organizations should use this guidance to ensure their websites and mobile applications meet accessibility standards required by law. Teams should follow the WCAG principles, use GOV.UK Design System components, and test with assistive technologies throughout development.
What to do next
- Consult guidance for leading accessibility teams
- Follow WCAG principles and success criteria for compliance
- Use GOV.UK Design System for accessible styles and components
Archived snapshot
Apr 16, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Guidance
Guidance and tools for digital accessibility
Find the best guidance and tools to meet the accessibility regulations.
From: Government Digital Service and Central Digital and Data Office Published 1 February 2021 Last updated 16 January 2026
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Meeting the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations
Leading a team on accessibility
If you lead a team and are responsible for the accessibility of your website this guidance will help you to meet the regulations. You could be working in a large government organisation or somewhere smaller like a school.
Accessibility requirements for public sector websites and apps
Working in a team making accessibility changes
If you work in a team that makes changes to your website this guidance will help you to know what you need to do to make your website meet the accessibility regulations.
Make your website or app accessible
Understand the WCAG principles, guidelines and success criteria
Follow accessibility guidance for your job role
Monitoring websites and mobile apps under the regulations
Find out how the Government Digital Service (GDS) is monitoring websites and mobile apps and understand how the sampling process works.
Public sector website and mobile application accessibility monitoring
Accessibility monitoring: How we test
Making your projects, programmes and infrastructure accessible and inclusive
Find out how to build, buy or supply accessible technology, and how this will help your programme.
Make things accessible and inclusive
Designing accessible services
When creating, updating or managing a service you need to think about accessibility. This guidance helps service designers and other people working on services to consider the most important facts when starting this work.
Making your service accessible
Find out what you should consider to make sure the service you’re building or managing is accessible.
Making your service accessible: An introduction
Using accessible styles, components and patterns
If you’re building your service on a .service.gov.uk domain, you should use the GOV.UK Design System’s accessible styles, components and patterns.
Including all users
There’s usually no alternative to using government services so they have to work for everyone. Making your service inclusive means making sure anyone who needs to can use it as easily as possible.
Making your service more inclusive
Testing with assistive technology
Testing with assistive technology throughout the development of your service will help you to find and fix accessibility problems and meet the needs of all your users.
Testing with assistive technologies
Finding user research participants
For your research to be effective, your participants must be actual or likely users of your service and you must include disabled people and people who use assistive technology. This guidance explains how to recruit the right participants.
Finding user research participants
Designing accessible content
Working with documents
If you are working with different content formats find out which ones work best to make things more accessible for all users.
Publishing accessible documents
Guidance for GOV.UK publishers
This content design guidance will help GOV.UK publishers make their content more accessible. It’s specifically written for people using the GOV.UK publishing tools, but it might still be useful if you publish elsewhere.
Find out about:
- structuring headings and start buttons
- writing accessible links
- avoiding duplicate page titles
- describing images, graphs and charts
- creating accessible tables
- making Whitehall publications accessible
- using open formats and avoiding PDFs
- creating accessible forms
- making videos accessible
- making translations accessible
Working with data
If you produce spreadsheets or workbooks of data, find out how to make them accessible.
Optimise spreadsheets for accessibility
Creating accessible communications
Find out how to make your social media posts accessible and inclusive.
Creating inclusive communications
Learn about communicating inclusively, portraying disability and how to make different types of accessible formats available.
Testing with accessibility personas
Find out about accessibility personas and how to use them to test your products and services.
Using persona profiles to test accessibility
Accessibility training
You can sign up for the following free training opportunities:
- Accessibility in Government: Getting Started from FutureLearn
- Introduction to Web Accessibility from edX - endorsed by W3C
- Introduction to UX and accessible design from FutureLearn
- Introduction to Digital Accessibility from AbilityNet
- User-centred design training and events in the Service Manual
Your website accessibility statement
You need an accessibility statement on your website or mobile app which details accessibility problems you have not fixed yet and any you are working on to resolve.
Use this sample accessibility statement to help you to write one for your organisation.
Sample accessibility statement
Join the accessibility community
Learn more about accessibility and share ideas and experiences with people working on solving accessibility problems across the public sector.
Find out more about the accessibility community
Published 1 February 2021 Last updated 16 January 2026 show all updates
1.
16 January 2026
Updated link to Guide to WCAG and added a link to Future Learn's Accessibility in Government course.
2.
9 August 2021
Link added to guidance on how to meet WCAG 2.1 principles and success criteria.
3.
27 July 2021
Links added to online resources including how to make technology and communications accessible and inclusive, using the GOV.UK Design System, testing with accessibility personas and free training. Links to content design guidance for GOV.UK publishers and working with data.
4.
29 March 2021
Removing duplication from the 'Including all users' section.
5.
25 March 2021
New content linking to the Service Manual and information on the website sampling process
6.
1 February 2021
First published.
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