5 JAN 2016

7 Top Tips To Make Your Job Portal Accessible

Equality, diversity and accessibility have been big topics for Further Education in 2015, with the sector demonstrating it has high ambitions to come up to the top standard in these areas.

Equality, diversity and accessibility have been big topics for Further Education in 2015, with the sector demonstrating it has high ambitions to come up to the top standard in these areas. Further Education Colleges are going out of their way to build equality and diversity into their syllabus, and accessibility into everything they do. As well as making the education they provide accessible to learners of all abilities, many Colleges want to help people with disabilities find employment. Some Colleges have suitable roles available that they would be delighted to offer to disabled candidates. However as it currently stands there are a number of barriers within FE role application systems that prevent disabled people applying for jobs. They make the application process impossible for them, even though they are perfectly capable of doing the job itself. Common disabilities that can be managed in the workplace include visual impairments, hearing loss and learning difficulties. To help disabled people find work and encourage them to apply for your institution, you need to make sure your College website and job portal is accessible and useable by a disabled person. Along with this, the underlying strategy is to making the candidate journey as short as possible.

The situation

The majority of Colleges have their own job portal to advertise roles available at the College. Generally, candidates have to navigate to the portal from the College website, search for job openings, and fill out the application form. This is either done on screen or by downloading, printing, filling out and returning the form. There are many ways to make this process accessible to a disabled person, and below we have listed our top 7 areas to focus on to make this happen.

1. Help them find the way

Partially sighted people often use screen readers to navigate the Internet. These go through the entire web page and read it out loud, line by line, in the order it appears in the code. Some readers let you skip from section to section, skip paragraphs etc, but it is still a slow, tedious business. To navigate websites successfully, disabled people need the site to be laid out logically with plenty of ‘signposts’ to help them through. Here are some things you can do to help:

• Divide your content into sections and give them appropriate headings. This can make the world of difference to someone using a screen reader, as many of these read headings first to help the user get to the relevant bit.
• Place “skip links” in the HTML code at the top of the page so users can get straight to where they want. Helpful ones for Colleges to use are ‘Access Job Portal’, ‘Skip navigation menu’, or ‘Skip to main content.’ Once in the job portal, you may want to include ones like 'See list of available roles', or 'download standard application form.' More advanced developers may choose to put the main content first in the HTML code instead.
• Include a list of available roles in the job portal rather than having a search function.
• Make sure the text on your website isn't too small.
• Make sure your links make contextual sense and explain what the link is to. For example, write “to network with FE professionals, visit our LinkedIn Further Education Network Group” rather than “to network with FE professionals, click here” or "download application form for role selected" rather than "to download application form, click here."
• Don’t set up your website, menu or job portal to be navigated to or around using images, as they can be unclear.

2. Formulate the best form

If your application process relies on the candidate filling out a form online, the form needs to be accessible too. There are a few ways to do this:

• When creating a form, make sure the text label for the field is very close to the actual field so a disabled person could work out which was for which.
• Remove any time out facility on the form as candidates may want to complete their application in stages.
• Make sure the form is built to be fully keyboard accessible, ensuring that it can be completed without the use of a mouse.

3. Tag, label and caption so everyone can read

Screen readers can’t read images or videos, so if you have images or videos on your website make sure they have ALT tags set for the reader to read. Without ALT tags the reader will say something like “image” when it comes to it in the code, so write a description for the image as the ALT tag that is clear and concise and describes the image and/or its important message. If your site has videos that are important, provide captioning and/or transcripts for them. YouTube has handy tools to help you add subtitles to your videos.

4. Remove bottlenecks and blocks

Many portals make the candidate register an account and set up a password before they can apply for the role, which forms another barrier. Consider removing this requirement if possible. CAPTCHAs are used to block spammers from filling in online forms, but they can be a nightmare for the partially sighted and blind who can’t read the letters in the image, and may struggle to find the 'hear CAPTCHA' button. To get around this, use a CAPTCHA script that provides a link to an audio file the visitor can play to hear the file. Some buttons, links and navigation items require the visitor to click on them, but have a very narrow clickable area, which can prevent candidates getting where they need to go. Try making the clickable area of an item wider so the visitor can click near it and still get to the right place.

5. Steer clear of...

JavaScripts can be used in website navigation or as part of the page content, and some depend on mouse or keyboard input to work, hiding information until a particular link or button is pressed or hovered over with the mouse. Avoid using this as far as possible for important information, and learn how you can make your JavaScript accessible here. Flash objects also cause accessibility issues, and as they are not compatible with many devices and bad for SEO, we recommend avoiding them completely. Where this isn't possible, make sure you read the information from Adobe on the accessibility features available and code the object to take advantage of them.

6. Don’t forget your grammar!

If you're abbreviating something in the copy, make sure you put periods in between each letter to help the screen reader make it intelligible. For example, if you're referencing the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, write it as D.V.L.A rather than DVLA so the screen reader recognises it as an abbreviation and doesn't try to pronounce it as a word.

7. Think about the colours

Colour blindness comes in many more variations than just the red/green variety. Some cause the afflicted to see everything in black and white, others struggle to distinguish between blue and yellow. Even if your site doesn’t use these colours the disability can cause the person to perceive colours differently. So your text may be indistinguishable from your background, or different elements (such as buttons) may merge into the page and become invisible. The key is to not make navigating your site dependent on colours. If users use links to navigate, and these are not underlined or are marked out simply by being in another colour, they could be invisible to colour blind users. Try to use black text on white for important information as this is readable by anyone. Be aware that white text on a black background is considered harder for people with good eyesight to read, so stay away from this if possible  

Test it out

There are several free online accessibility checkers such as WAVE that you can use to see what areas of your site might be problematic. You can learn more about creating an accessible Web site by visiting the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative.   What measures does your College use to make your job portal accessible? Please let us know in the comments.