Accessibility Consultant (Mid-Weight)

Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) enables the Home Office to keep the UK safe and secure. We design and build the services that help people apply for visas or passports; support policing and counter-terrorism operations; and protect the UK’s borders.

DDaT has a central team that’s responsible for defining standards and assuring quality. As a member, you will be providing delivery teams across the department with the tools, guidance and support they need to meet these standards. Your priority is to make sure users always come first and that everything we do meets their needs.

Job description:

You will be an experienced individual who has got great technical and interpersonal skills to help teams, portfolios and programmes to create fully accessible and inclusive services. You will do this by helping them achieve compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 whilst always striving to go beyond pure compliance and delivering truly accessibility at all times.

You will be passionate about accessibility and experienced in testing using assistive technologies.

You will help to ensure that public services and internal systems cater for the needs of all users, by supporting teams to embed accessibility and inclusive design and to carry out accessibility reviews at all stages of development, before services are released to the public.

You will be very comfortable explaining and demonstrating accessibility issues and you’ll be eager to transfer your expertise appropriately across the range of digital professionals.

Responsibilities:


Day to day, you will:

• Contribute to and disseminate accessibility standards and guidance for the various DDaT roles and within the accessibility team

• Deliver training on designing and testing services for accessibility

• Support delivery teams to incorporate accessibility in acceptance criteria and to perform manual and automated testing themselves, typically in an agile environment

• Conduct in-house holistic reviews, WCAG audits and assistive technology testing of all elements of services, throughout the design and development lifecycle or procurement and set-up

• Communicate prioritised issues discovered during testing, along with pragmatic solutions and improvement recommendations, to delivery teams. Input to status reports to those assessing conformance with the Government Service Standard

• Participate in mechanisms to ensure quality, consistency, effectiveness and efficiency of consultants’ reviews