Our site contains many news articles that have been created by multiple editors over many years. News articles are rarely updated once published but do remain on the site as an archive of information. We do not run an accessibility check on each news article.
Scope
This assessment relates to news articles on the www.solent.ac.uk website. We have audited our news listing page, the newsroom and news article template to ensure that they meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standards, but we do not assess every individual news article.
Benefits
The benefits of assessing each news article would be:
- To ensure that all news articles published are fully accessible to all users.
Burden
Our assessment of the burden of assessing each article is:
- In 2021 we published around 300 news articles.
- These equated to just 1.66% of our website’s overall page views.
- Each full assessment of a news article would take roughly an hour to complete.
- Due to the level of accessibility testing resources within the team, we deem that spending a full 40 working days each year auditing each news article is a disproportionate burden and users would get more benefit from more popular pages being tested.
Other factors
Also relevant to this decision:
- We have provided the necessary tools for editors to make the news pages accessible.
- We ensure that relevant accessibility-related content fields in our content management system are mandatory.
- We will evaluate whether there is automated software that can run reports on each news article to support our accessibility efforts.
- We will provide additional training to all news editors to make sure they understand accessibility fundamentals and it is considered with each published news article.
Planned changes
- We will evaluate whether there is automated software that can run reports on each news article to support our accessibility efforts.
- We will provide additional training to all news editors to make sure they understand accessibility fundamentals and it is considered with each published news article.
Assessment
There is a high cost in terms of employee hours to test each news article individually. The news articles only represent 1.66% of our total page views which shows interest is limited to a small segment of our website users. We have tested the news templates we use and therefore the vast majority of news pages should pass AA accessibility standards. We always respond to and resolve accessibility issues that are highlighted to us and deem in this instance that is sufficient.
We expect this disproportionate burden to be required for news articles indefinitely.
