By law, all public sector websites need to be accessible and publish an accessibility statement. For background on this, see the accessibility guidance on gov.uk.

Fortunately, as long as you take care when creating your Voice website, it will meet WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards.

All the Voice themes have good colour contrast, and use clear semantic markup in the layouts to make it easy for screen readers to understand. And whenever you add images to pages you can provide alternative text. So with a bit of care there is no reason why a Voice site wouldn't be compliant.

That said, it is possible for sites to arrange content however they want to, use crazy colour schemes, use unclear links, write unintelligibly, and so on. So it isn't guaranteed!

There generally needs to be some sort of audit of a site to check that it is compliant - automated tools can't fully check that you have used a good site content structure for example. However it's not especially complicated!

If you want to audit it yourself, there are a few things you can do.

• Check that the structure of the content of the site is easy to understand - e.g., clear sections for News, for Events, and so on - make it easy for people to find things.
• Choose a theme with a clear colour scheme. The Fresh and Clarity themes are best here as they have bit fonts and clear colours and plenty of space. The Bootstrap theme is generally fine too but it's easier to trip up with this as there are so many different layout options available!
• Use a tool like Grammarly to check that the language and writing style is easy to understand.
• Review your site using an accessibility checker such as the WAVE browser extension. See what it picks up. If you're using custom colours you may need to change some to get higher contrast ratios in some places.

Once you've done the review you should then prepare an accessibility statement. There's a model accessibility statement here which can be used as a starting point.

It is reasonable to have some exceptions - where bits don't meet WCAG AA - as long you and can justify them and put them in the accessibility statement. e.g., one acceptable reason could be that there's a problem in part of the site that you can't edit, such as in one of the standard applications.

That said, if there are errors in parts of the site you can't edit (e.g., the colour scheme or navbar) then let us know on the Forums and we will see if we can fix it, or if we can suggest how you might improve it.