Accessibility statement

What accessibility guidelines do we work to?

We’re currently working towards meeting an accessibility standard set out in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These are designed to help the providers of online services to understand how they can make their products easier to use for people of all abilities, and cover areas such as a website’s navigation, language and layout. They’re the main accessibility standards recognised internationally and are produced by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Specifically, as a starting point, we’re aiming to reach the ‘Level A’ standard of WCAG 2.2. For more on these guidelines, head over to the W3C website.

We’re working towards achieving Level A in a number of ways, including talking with our users and trying out various accessibility tools to determine where we can make our site more accessible. When we run user-testing sessions, we do our best to make sure we include users who are vulnerable, or who have a known disability.

What areas are we working to improve?

In working towards achieving WCAG 2.1 Level A, we’ve identified aspects of our website that we know aren’t as accessible as they could be.

Although we feel some features of our website do meet certain accessibility standards – for example, we try to use plain and jargon-free language, with the aim of being easily understood – there are some parts of our site that we’re working to improve on:

Ensuring that all non-text content has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose.
Ensuring that all headings are coded with heading tags as well as being displayed in bold font.
Ensuring that colour is not used as the only visual means of conveying information by making sure Links are underlined or have a distinct shape change so colour-blind users can find them.
Introducing hidden ‘skip to main content’ links to assist non-sighted users and others who navigate sequentially through content to skip repeated content.
Ensuring that all links have appropriately descriptive anchors.
Adding a code declaration to inform users that the language is English to aid pronunciation.
Adding labels such as ‘open navigation menu’ to all hamburger menus for mobile users.

We will continue to work on improving the accessibility of our website and will regularly review and update this page as we do so.

What about the external services that we use?

We sometimes feature third-party content, plus other organisations also help our website to function. This may include:

LinkedIn and other social media posts displaying relevant information
Insight tools which tell us how people are using our website

We also work with third parties to run certain parts of our site on our behalf. We can’t always guarantee how accessible any third-party content will be, and don’t assume any responsibility for third-party applications.

Have some feedback for us? Please let us know

It is our genuine aim to make this site ever more accessible. Your help is needed, however. We are looking to improve constantly, meaning your feedback and suggestions are invaluable.

If you’d like to make any suggestions as to how we could improve our accessibility, please email us at help@sharegift.org