IFCo develops accessible website

July 3, 2024
Christina Cullen

As an organisation, we are committed to ensuring the accessibility of our website to users with disabilities to enable the most enjoyable and positive user-experience. As such, our new and updated web content meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, AA standards.

‍What is WCAG 2.2

 

WCAG 2.2 defines how to make web content more accessible to people with disabilities. Accessibility involves a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities.

Level AA is an intermediate level of accessibility, more comprehensive than Level A. Meeting Level AA means going a step further to accommodate a broader range of disabilities. It includes all Level A requirements and additional criteria.

Whilst not a legal requirement for organisations and companies, WCAG 2.2 AA is the new minimum accessibility standard for all UK Government public sector websites and mobile apps.

WCAG is based on four main guiding principles of accessibility known by the acronym POUR: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.

 

What does this mean for our website?

 

New content meets the WCAG standards and we will continually audit the website to identify improvements as technologies, society and best-practice shift. In real terms, changes to improve the website’s accessibility have included:

  • Fixing the colour palette so that there is enough contrast to meet WCAG AA compliance
  • Giving links a hover state beyond a simple colour change so that visually impaired or colour-blind users can identify interactive elements
  • Adding buttons to toggle the pausing and playing of animations to help users with neurodiverse conditions
  • Getting the site to recognise when a user has their motion-reduced system setting set to true on their device to replace animations with still images
  • Removing any unnecessary pop-ups so that users who need to zoom in don’t get lost or stuck in a pop-up without realising

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Read our full Accessibility Policy.

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