Implement accessibility improvements to the website

[kellylee-gds]

Brief

By the end of this brief, we should achieved the following:

• ship improvements to search results to improve the experience of screen reader users
• fix or adjust link text issues identified in the content audit
• update our accessibility strategy to include information on how we deal with bugs in 3rd party software

We should also consider publicly documenting our decision making rationale regarding these changes on the community backlog or GitHub discussions.

Epic lead

Owen

Driving role(s)

Hazal, Calvin, Anika

Supporting roles

Kelly

Tasks

Beta Give feedback

1. Re-design visuals of search results #4195
   +0
   
2. Talk to DAC about possible solutions for vendor issues #4194
   accessibility audit july 2024 +2
   
3. Which squad is doing the details fix, if DAC like it? Probably us but need to talk to beeps and Char
4. Audit and fix our link text for screen reader users #4267
   audit july 2024 guidance +2
   
5. https://github.com/alphagov/design-system-team-internal/issues/918
6. Update the website's accessibility statement #4269
   accessibility accessibility statement audit july 2024 +3
   
7. For post-cycle: feed remaining audit issues to the leads (thread in slack about this on hover states)

Stretch goals

Beta Give feedback

1. Figure out how to explain acronyms on the website #4268
   audit july 2024 guidance +2
2. Investigate technical feasability of a search page #4270
   🔍 investigation +1
3. Investigate creating a browser extension for Dragon users to fix our dragon vendor issues govuk-frontend#5448
   accessibility javascript 🔍 investigation +3
4. Create an automated task to check the accessibility of the whole website #4271
   javascript +1

[kellylee-gds]

It's looking likely that the File upload & Details brief will be paused this cycle due to the squad member's capacity. We still want to review DAC's feedback if it's received this cycle and make a decision on how to proceed. We'll then assess whether we think we have time / capacity to build the production code for Details and / or create the browser extension for Dragon.