Raising a local authority website from WCAG A to AA

Our client, a small local authority, needed its website to meet a higher standard of accessibility. The site conformed to WCAG level A, and UK public-sector rules require level AA. The brief was clear: raise the site to the level the rules set.

A council website is a public service in its own right. Residents of every age and ability use it to find information and get things done, and some rely on assistive technology to do it. Every accessibility barrier on the site stood between a resident and a service. The authority came to us for support in finding those barriers and removing them.

We started with an audit in two parts. Automated accessibility tools checked the site against known accessibility failures, and a manual review of the site's pages caught the issues that automated checks alone can miss. Together, they showed exactly what needed to change.

Based on those findings, we made a series of changes that significantly improved accessibility. Colour contrast is now much stronger throughout the website, so content is easier to read for everyone. The cookie consent options became simpler and more user-friendly. We reduced motion across the site, and we addressed visual content that lacked accessibility tags or text alternatives, so assistive technology has something meaningful to announce.

Alongside these fixes, we carried out a small site rebuild. It improved accessibility and lifted the user experience as a whole, which reflects how we approach this work: good user experience makes good accessibility easy to design.

The site now conforms to WCAG AA, the level UK public-sector rules require, up from level A.

The change shows in how people use the site. Since the changes, the bounce rate has fallen across the site's pages, and visitors spend longer on some of them. Accessibility and a better experience for every visitor came from the same design decisions.