Accessibility law and standards

Understand the laws and standards that apply to digital services.

Camden’s digital services must be accessible to everyone who needs them. Any website or app that is not may be breaking the law.

An accessible service is one that supports people with different abilities or who need to use assistive technology.

Using the accessible styles and components in our design system will help you meet the required standards. But you need to do additional research, design, development and testing work to make sure your service is accessible.

Improving accessibility across Camden’s digital products and services is a continuous process. We are committed to designing services for all our citizens.

Accessibility and the law

By law in the UK, public services need to meet:

• The Equality Act 2010, which makes it illegal to discriminate against people based on their disability
• The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018, which sets the standards and conditions websites and apps must meet
• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which states that individuals must be able to access their personal data

The regulations apply to all our digital services. This includes camden.gov.uk and its subdomains, as well as:

• services built by suppliers contracted to the Council
• services mostly funded by the Council
• internal services, such as intranets
• services in beta

Any documents or PDFs published after September 23, 2018, should also be accessible.

Meeting the requirements

To meet accessibility requirements, services must:

• meet at least level AA of the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• publish an up-to-date accessibility statement which includes anywhere this standard is not met and why

Accessibility is everyone’s responsibility. It needs to be considered at the start of any design process and at every stage that follows. It's harder and more expensive to make a service accessible later.

Include people with access needs when testing your service with users. This will help you to spot and correct issues early.

Why it’s important

At least 1 in 5 people report having a disability in the UK. Many more people may have a temporary disability, injury or situation that affects how they use digital services.

The Council provides services that everyone in the community needs. So, everyone needs to be able to access them.

Improving accessibility could mean:

• adjusting colour contrast so people can easily find information
• adding captions to a video so people who can’t hear can understand
• making sure webpages can be navigated by keyboard, if someone can’t use a mouse

Our goal is to help everyone use our services without problems, no matter what their abilities are. An accessible website is usually better for everyone who uses it.

Read guidance from GOV.UK to learn more about why accessibility is essential when building digital services.