Accessibility

The NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA) Open Data Portal is an instance of CKAN, an open source data portal platform, and has been made compliant with WCAG 2.1 (AA) accessibility standards.

WCAG ensures that the web application’s contents are accessible to people with disabilities which includes hearing and vision impairment.

Key points

The accessibility improvements have been done to assist people with the following disabilities: People with visual impairments, People with mobility impairments, People with cognitive impairments, People with hearing impairments.

The following highlights the various issues we have addressed with the objective of achieving a high level of accessibility.

Alternative text

All images on this site are accompanied by a brief alternative text which, where appropriate, identifies an image or its function.

Color contrasts

Color contrasts have been Updated to meeting the WCAG 2.1 (AA) requirments. This helps in people with vision disabilities to view the website content with ease.

Links

All text links are written so that they make sense when read out of context. Links to external sites will open in a new browser window.

Screen readers

The markup of the portal has been modified in order to improve the screen readers' performance. This helps in people with disabilities to easily navigate through the website.

The portal is optimized for various screen sizes to support a wide range of devices and automatic scaling based on the size of the screen and pixels available.

Tests

  • Axe
  • Wave
  • WCAG Color Contrast Checker
  • Siteimprove Accessibility Chrome extension
  • AChecker

Manual testing

  • Chrome Inspector Tools
  • Firefox Code Inspector
  • Keyboard Navigation
  • Non-visual Navigation with a screen reader

Testing and compliance of accessibility was inspired from the GOV.UK service manual about accessibility standards.

Known issues

Data explorer

Unfortunately the data explorer feature of the Open Data Portal is not accessible as per WCAG 2.1 guidelines. If you require a filtered subset of a dataset and are unable to do so using the data explorer feature please contact us.

Feedback

Feedback is important to us, and helps us improve the system and services we provide.

We’re still developing our Open Data Portal so please tell us what you think. You can send your feedback to: DataServicesSupport@nhsbsa.nhs.uk