Public sector digital team · Accessibility · Content Design
Passing a GOV.UK Accessibility Audit
A UX case study on fixing the root cause, not the symptom.
- Process Mapping
- Accessibility Audit
- Partner Training
- Authoring Standards
Section 01 — The Brief
Make our online guides accessible.
The organisation was authoring content heavy user guides, using MS Word, for cross border traders. Once done, they then converted the guides to the PDF format and uploaded to the organisation website. As the client was a UK Gov department, the need was that the guides should be accessible and meet WCAG 2.2. The PDF guides broke many accessibility guidelines so the requirement was to make them accessible.
"The PDF wasn’t the problem. The Word document that created it was."
— Root-cause discovery insight
Problem Depth
5 — Systemic
Scale
1 = Surface fix · 5 = Root-cause issue
needed authoring guidance
of inaccessible source content
rebuilt upstream
Section 02 — Discovery
The real problem was upstream.
Simply remediating the PDF documents would not fix the underlying issue. The source Word documents, authored by partners, were themselves inaccessible: screenshots replaced real content, colour carried meaning on its own, headings lacked semantic structure, and tables were used for layout rather than data.
The Resource Constraint
Designing around internal capability.
The internal team lacked any technical web knowledge, and resource was heavily constrained. Any solution that required manual remediation or complex code fixes post-conversion would fail to be sustainable.
"Treating the PDF as the problem would have fixed the symptom while leaving the inaccessible production process untouched."
Section 2.5 — The Discarded Path
The Dead End: Why PDF Remediation Failed.
Before rewriting the entire workflow, I needed to test the obvious, surface-level solution: simply remediating the existing PDFs. To get the wider team onside and prove we needed a systemic change, I ran a trial to see what it would take to manually bring the current PDFs up to WCAG 2.2 standards.
It was immediately clear that this path was completely impractical.
The Remediation Reality Check
Onerous Process
Every single document required manual tagging, rebuilding complex layout tables from scratch, re-specifying reading orders, and hunting down authors for missing alt text.
Time Sink
A single medium-sized guide took hours of expert remediation time.
Zero Scalability
With multiple partners continuously pumping out new guides, the internal digital team would have become a permanent, expensive bottleneck.
"We couldn't out-remediate a broken pipeline. Showing the team the sheer hours required to fix just one PDF was the turning point that got everyone bought into fixing the upstream source."
Section 03 — The Approach
Move the fix to the authoring stage.
I mapped the end-to-end production process, identified the authoring stage as the point of failure, and rebuilt the workflow as a four-step programme that fixes accessibility at the source.
Step 1
Build a new accessible Word template
Create a Word template with semantic styles, proper heading structure, accessible colour use, and built-in guidance — so accessibility is the default, not an afterthought.
Section 04 — The Outcome
A sustainable publishing system.
The process now produces accessible HTML guides that a web content editor can upload directly, with no expert remediation needed. Content editors author to an accessible standard from the start.
Accessibility is a process problem
The inaccessible guides were not only a technical output issue; they were created by an upstream authoring workflow without clear standards.
Training outlasts remediation
Show-and-tell sessions, WCAG 2.1 AA guidance, and GOV.UK content principles created culture change beyond a one-off fix.
Work upstream for compounding benefit
Introducing standards for semantic headings, real text, alt text, accessible colour use, and data tables improved every future guide at source.
Key Lessons
Fix the system, not the file.
Accessibility problems are often process problems. Working upstream with content authors creates compounding benefit, while show-and-tell is more persuasive than documentation alone.
Accessibility · Content Design · Public Sector Digital Team