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Comment by sigwinch28 | Hacker News Reader

I am happy to see the author mention WCAG and British Dyslexia Association. They seem to have a refreshingly strong focus on accessibility.

I wonder how much of an uphill battle is fought inside the GDS and across the UK government to push for this kind of universal access.

Also, it's amazing how much of a "brand" GOV.UK is for me even in spite of (or perhaps due to?) its accessibility. To me the brand is: big strong blobs of the high-contrast colour palette, GDS Transport (the typeface), and a relatively (but pleasingly) narrow content.

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I've worked for a few UK departments and been very impressed with not only their adherence to WCAG 2.1 AAA on user-facing tools, but also on internal administration tools. Accessibility is strictly required and your project will not be allowed to be released without it.

So they don’t have any video content on the sites?

Or do they actually have a sign language interpreter on each video on every site?

I don't recall running across video on gov.uk sites -- and offhand, can't think of any case where it would have been desirable.

This is documented under the 'video' section on the publishing guidelines[0]. Videos are heavily dissuaded for a large number of reasons.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/images-...

In a previous job I worked on a site which had to meet gov UK guidelines despite not strictly being directly hosted on gov.uk, and early in production every video was re-recorded / re-produced with sign language interpretation included to meet guidelines.

They took accessibility incredibly seriously.

That’s awesome! If only more goverments realised the need for this!

They specifically try to steer clear of video content. It's less accessible, worse for people scanning for information, worse for people on slow connections or mobile data connections, and can become outdated whilst also being much harder to update.

They try to avoid video because it's data heavy and difficult to update. Though when I applied for a Civil Service job the videos had a signed version and a transcript.

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