How accessible are your communications? A free self-assessment

The assessment walks you through eight areas of communications accessibility, each with a set of honest, practical questions designed to be answered by a comms or marketing team member, with no technical expertise required.

Digital covers your website, apps, and online platforms against the core WCAG 2.2 AA requirements. It asks about heading structure, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, form labels, focus indicators, and whether you’ve had a formal audit. For public sector bodies and publicly-funded charities, several of these questions carry legal compliance flags under the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018.

Documents and publications is where most organisations discover their biggest blind spot. The questions cover PDF tagging, heading styles in Word documents, alt text on charts and infographics, table structure, text sizing, and whether documents are available in alternative formats. Most organisations produce visually polished documents that are completely invisible to screen readers, and have no idea.

Video and audio asks about captions (human-reviewed, not just auto-generated), audio description, transcripts, player accessibility, and whether you’ve considered BSL interpretation. Video is one of the most powerful storytelling tools in the sector and one of the most commonly inaccessible.

Social media covers alt text on images, captions on video, CamelCase hashtags, emoji usage, contrast in branded graphics, and descriptive link text. This is often the easiest area to fix and the most frequently overlooked.

Print and designed materials connects brand design directly to accessibility. If your brand guidelines specify a 9pt light-weight font on a pastel background, every leaflet, poster, and report that follows those guidelines inherits an accessibility problem. The questions cover text sizes, contrast, colour usage, typeface legibility, layout logic, and paper stock.

Physical spaces covers wayfinding, signage, event accessibility, and whether information presented in physical environments is also available in non-visual formats. This section can be skipped if your organisation doesn’t have public-facing premises or run events.

Language and content bridges accessibility and good communications practice. It asks about plain English, Easy Read, acronym usage, content structure, inclusive language, and multilingual provision. The average UK reading age is nine to eleven years. Content written above that level excludes a significant proportion of the population, including many disabled people.

Organisational practice assesses whether accessibility is embedded in how your organisation works, not just what it produces. Do you have a policy? Is accessibility in your procurement requirements? Does your team have training? Is there a named person responsible? Do you involve disabled people in testing? This section is what separates genuine commitment from performative compliance.

The tool calculates your score across each section and produces an overall accessibility rating (Strong, Developing, Gaps Identified, or Needs Attention) with a visual breakdown that shows immediately where you’re doing well and where the gaps are.

More importantly, it generates prioritised recommendations grouped into three tiers. Quick wins are things you can fix this week with no budget: adding alt text to social images, switching to CamelCase hashtags, running the built-in accessibility checker before publishing documents. Medium-term improvements need some planning or modest investment: commissioning professional captions, developing Easy Read versions of key documents, adding accessibility requirements to your brief templates. Structural changes are where professional support or strategic investment is needed: a full website audit, a brand and accessibility review, or the development of an organisational accessibility policy.

The report is yours to keep. You can email it to yourself, copy a shareable link for colleagues or leadership, or use it to build the case for investment internally.

Accessibility is a public good. Making it easier for organisations to understand where they stand, honestly, without shame, and with clear next steps, is something we believe should be freely available regardless of whether an organisation ever works with Ave.

That said, if the assessment surfaces issues that need professional support, we’re well placed to help. Our Brand and Accessibility Audit covers your visual identity, templates, website, and communications with expert evaluation and a prioritised action plan. Our design retainers build accessibility quality assurance into ongoing creative production. And our strategic work helps organisations embed accessibility at the policy and process level, not just the output level.

But the tool doesn’t require any of that. It’s useful on its own, and it’s designed to be.

For public sector bodies and charities that receive significant public funding, accessibility is not optional. The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require websites and apps to meet WCAG 2.2 AA, with active monitoring by GDS. The Equality Act 2010 requires all service providers to consider reasonable adjustments for disabled people, an obligation that extends well beyond websites into print, events, communications, and service delivery. The European Accessibility Act, effective from June 2025, creates additional requirements for organisations selling into the EU.

Despite this, accessibility issues were found on nearly all websites tested during the most recent GDS monitoring period. The gap between legal requirement and actual practice is significant, and it is not limited to digital. This tool helps you see the full picture.