For the most part, Voice websites do meet WCAG 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 alt text, and so on. 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, 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 really check that you have used a good site content structure for example. However it's not hugely 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!
• You could try using a tool like Grammarly to check that the language used 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 a bit 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 one here which can be used as a starting point:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/model-accessibility-statement

I think it's reasonable to have some exceptions - where bits don't meet WCAG AA - as long as you are aware of them and put them in the accessibility statement. 

If there are errors in parts of the site you can't fix (e.g., the colour scheme or navbar) then let me know and I'll see if I can tweak the theme, or I can suggest how you might improve it.

I am hoping to try to automate this a bit in a future Voice update - e.g., a default accessibility statement that can be easily edited. But to some extent, even then, it's worth checking it over yourself and putting together the statement, just to be sure it's relevant to your site.

I hope this helps!

If anyone else has any tips they would be gratefully received, and I will happily compile the suggestions into a helpsheet.

Update: I've added the above info into a helpsheet, and will update it with more information as and when I have it!

Thanks

Joe