WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and is the international standard for making digital content perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust for all users - including those with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive impairments.

Whilst the law in the United Kingdom such as Equality Act (2020) doesn't specifically mention WCAG, courts and regulators, as well as local government auditors, will frequently consider WCAG compliance as evidence that a public sector body has met it's legal duty to be accessible. Other legislation such as The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations do specifically refer to WCAG 2.1 though so this is further evidence that this is the preferred indication of accessibility for government and other public sector websites.

Yes, Assertion 10 ties your accessibility requirements to evidence. Importantly it ties it to on-going evidence, so whilst you don't necessarily need to have an audit scan complete you need to be able to demonstrate through evidence that your site is compliant and accessible.

We recommend at least quarterly scans to ensure you have that evidence, but there are other ways. For example if you had your site scanned and could then evidence that you haven't changed anything with it since the scan then that could constitute on-going evidence.

Having an accessibility statement doesn't make your site accessible, the purpose of an accessibility statement is to make clear to members of the public and website visitors what you are going to do to ensure your website is accessible to everyone equally.

Writing a statement is a great start, and usually that statement would include a description of the practical steps you are going to take to ensure your site is accessible, our advice is that this includes regular testing and monitoring of the site to make sure that your site does what your statement says it does.

If you pay for any of our accessibility audit services we will provide you with an accessibility statement template you can use. If you are using either of our monitoring services alongside a Pear Space website then we will automatically publish and update your statement for you every time a scan completes.

The audit we carry out typically scans all public facing pages of your website, we do this by crawling the site and following all the internal links on the site to discover all the content. We examine every bit of content and interactive element of the site to evaluate it against the standard, including page content, calendars, search boxes, images, and widgets such as maps or social media embeds. We use both automated tests and manual human checks to ensure we've not missed anything.

We don't scan attachments at this time, so anything such as Word documents, PDF documents etc will not be scanned. In fact if we find links to external documents we'll warn you that this may not be accessible.

They can be, but normally they are not. Lots of councils publish agendas and minutes in PDF or Microsoft Word format, these are not accessible typically and so would constitute a non-compliance.

The good news is that a Pear Space website includes tools to automatically publish your minutes and agendas in an accessible way, just upload the Word or PDF document and our software does the rest, so you can be fully compliant with no extra time or effort spent.

Our one off audit, or the initial audit if you are signing up to monitoring typically takes us about a week to complete our tests and write your report. Sometimes it can be quicker though, as soon as the report is ready we'll send it over to you.

If you have a particular deadline in mind such as an upcoming council meeting let us know and we can prioritise your report to ensure you have it in time.

Not at all, we're here to help all public sector organisations ensure compliance with accessibility regulations. No matter who made your website, we're here to help. Just get in touch, give us your website address, and we'll do the rest.

At the end of the audit you'll have a comprehensive report to give to your provider to then work on making changes to your website. We'll even chat directly with your current provider to help them understand elements of the report if necessary.

At the end of the audit you'll have a detailed multi-page PDF that contains all the information necessary to bring your website into compliance. That isn't the end of it though, we're here to guide and support you making changes to become compliant via email and phone.

If you like though, we can also help you fix the issues directly and update your website to make it compliant. In some cases we can even do this if your website wasn't built by us and is hosted elsewhere. Get in touch with us to find out more about how we can help.

Not at all, there are a few providers out there who claim to be the only true experts on accessible websites for local government and this just isn't true. We use the same tools and expertise as those providers combined with our decades of experience in the industry to provide you with truly exceptional care and support.

Don't let yourself be pressured into using a certain provider, give us a call and chat, we're sure you're going to love us! No pressure selling from us, if you don't quite gel with us then that's fine too, no hard feelings.

No, you are free to use any provider at all. Ultimately there is no law that says you have to use a certain provider, only that your website has to be accessible. It's up to you how you do this, the best way of doing this is to get an audit and make appropriate fixes to your site using a provider such as ourselves, but it can be any provider you like and trust.

We certainly can! Whilst we may not be able to read Welsh or Gaelic, we can still verify the text sizes, colours, contrast, accessibility, underlying code etc. We don't need to be able to understand it to make sure it's accessible to all.

If you opt for quarterly scanning we scan your website every quarter at a schedule to suit you. If you opt for real time monitoring then we will scan your website pages every time you make an edit, if the page is found to have issues we will display an alert on the page warning you of the problem and explaining how to fix it.

Our one off audits and the initial audit we conduct when signing up to monitoring are all carried out manually with a combination of automated tooling and human verification, which is then provided to you in a PDF suitable for sharing with your council members or just reading and understanding yourself.

Once your site is compliant and monitoring begins, our systems will conduct automated scans at a schedule to suit you that will email automatically to advise if anything non-compliant is found. If you are using our latest website template you can download the latest copy of the human readable report from the accessibility tab of your website control panel.

Potentially yes, it is a requirement of all government domains in the United Kingdom, including .gov.uk, .gov.wales, .llyw.cymru, and .gov.scot that your website be accessible. We highly recommend that WCAG auditing is the best way to demonstrate compliance with this requirement, and the law in general.