Digital Accessibility Audit Results

In November 2021, Ashford Borough Council received its’ first accessibility audit from the website accessibility monitoring team at the Central Digital & Data Office, which is part of the Cabinet Office.

We have been aware of a potential audit of our website since the regulations and monitoring came into effect in September 2018 but we had no idea when we would be randomly selected for an audit.

Therefore we took an accessibility-first approach when it came to building our new website, which launched in August 2020. We also take this approach to test all new developments for the website before deploying them.

Upon receiving our audit we were given 12 weeks to make the recommended fixes. The issues that were flagged included colour contrast, keyboard navigation and pdf formatting.

The audit was carried out testing a small sample of pages on www.ashford.gov.uk but as our website is built around a core group of page templates, the results of this audit gave us a good indication of how accessible our website is overall.

In addition to the results of the audit, we regularly use a combination of manual and automated accessibility as part of our on-going journey to make our services as accessible as possible for all of our customers. This ensured we were able to fix the few issues that were flagged within our 12 week deadline.