Record a goose sighting

What to do

Go to the ‘Record a goose sighting’ exercise

This is a fictional service, to help you record any sightings of geese (geese are awesome). It’s using the GOV.UK Design system, which are WCAG 2.1 AA compliant, and benefits from hundreds of hours of work and testing. However, even if you’re using a Design System, stuff can still go wrong…

There are places where the Design System is misused, misimplemented or misunderstood. This has caused accessibility issues, which range across code, design and content - because accessibility issues can be introduced by all of these disciplines. As such, anyone is welcome to have a go and use this as an exercise!

How to use this

The task is to find as many of the accessibility issues in this site as you can in ~20 minutes.

There is a worksheet, and there is also a list of answers - but give it the full 20 minutes before you look at the answers first, if you’re working through this alone!

If you are running this as a group workshop, there is an answerless ‘Record a goose sighting’ exercise, that you can use with attendees. This prevents you from finding answers before you’re ready to go through them as a group!

What testing tools to use

I would recommend working through the site in the following order:

• Can you access everything by pressing the tab key?
• Does WAVE show any errors, or highlight any issues with the HTML structure?
• Does the colour contrast tab on WAVE throw up any errors?
• Install and run Accessibility Insights. What advice does it give you?

Government Digital Services have recently published how to conduct a basic accessibility audit, which is worth a look at too.

Testing like this is a good way to identify basic accessibility issues. It would not replace an audit against WCAG 2.1 to level AA, and its ~50 criteria. Why still do it? These are tests that are quick to run, and it’s easier to fix accessibility issues at the start, rather than the end.