Here's One Solution

Letter to Startup Britain website

The UK Government are sponsoring a website to encourage Startup Britain.

As with 90% of UK Government websites, there are basic accessibility issues that would take somebody 5 minutes to put right. Here’s the email I sent explaining a couple of quick and easy fixes.

Hi there,

Your website looks like it could be a useful tool, but I spotted a couple of problems that could make it difficult for those with disabilities to use.

Firstly, there is no way to know where you are on the page if you’re using a keyboard and not a mouse. You have the following line in your CSS.

/resource/css/site/base/site.css line 91

a {
    text-decoration: none;
    outline: none;
}

If you remove it, then links that people have focused on by using the tab key will have an outline and they will know where they are on the page.

The next big issue is to do with the email signup form.

<fieldset>
	<input class="clear-input textbox" id="register-email" name="entry.0.single" value="Your email address">
	<a class="submit button" href="/"><span>GO</span></a>
</fieldset>

There are a number of problems here that make the form difficult for people using a screenreader to use.

1) No <form/> element. This makes it hard for people to know where on the page the form is.
2) No <label/> associated with the <input/> element.
3) An <a/> element with ambiguous text instead of a <input type="submit"/> element.
4) Form won’t work without JavaScript.

Much better would be to use something like this:

<form action="/register" method="post">
<fieldset>
	<label for="register-email">Your email address</label>
	<input class="clear-input textbox" id="register-email" name="entry.0.single" value="Your email address">
	<span class="button"><input type="submit" value="Go" class="submit" /></span>
</fieldset>
</form>

With this code the JavaScript enhanced form would still work, but it would fall back to a regular form if JavaScript is not available for any reason.

Hopefully your web design team can implement these changes quickly and make the site easier to use for people with disabilities. It may be worth asking them to check the rest of the site as there may well be other problems that I didn’t immediately notice.

If you have any questions then drop me a line.
Best regards
David