Accessibility Statement Frontend is a service for providing for accessibility statements across HMRC.
Adding an accessibility statement involves creating a structured text file known as a YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) file and adding to this repository.
Creating such a file does not require any coding skills and can be done in a simple text editor, online YAML editor or even directly within Github. However, if you are a developer you may prefer to use your preferred IDE and Git to upload the YAML file to the repository.
First create a YAML file similar to the one listed below. This example includes all possible fields. Your statement may not need all of these fields depending on whether your service is fully, partially or non-compliant. Note that the text following the # characters are comments and will not appear in the fully rendered accessibility statement.
serviceName: Discounted Icecreams # The service name that will appear in the title of the accessibility statement.
# Do not include the word service at the end, as this will be added by the templates
serviceDescription: | # A description of the service
Use this paragraph to describe your service. It can go over multiple lines
like this.
serviceDomain: www.tax.service.gov.uk # The domain name under which this service exists (exclude the https:// and the path)
serviceUrl: /icecreams # The relative URL to the service (omitting www.tax.service.gov.uk)
contactFrontendServiceId: icecreams # A unique identifier for your service (see notes below)
complianceStatus: partial # full|partial|noncompliant
accessibilityProblems: # If there are no issues do not include this section
- a description of the first problem
- another description of a problem
- a description of the last problem
milestones: # If there are no issues do not include this section
- description: The X page does not have Y and also does not display Z. This doesn't meet WCAG success
criterion X.Y.Z (Criterion Description).
date: 2020-10-31 # The date that this issue will be fixed by in ISO format YYYY-MM-DD
- description: |
The service has errors in X and incorrectly nested Z which means assistive technologies
cannot use the service reliably. This does not meet WCAG success criterion
X.Y.Z (Criterion Description).
date: 2020-09-30 # The date that this issue will be fixed by
serviceLastTestedDate: 2019-09-15 # In ISO format YYYY-MM-DD. If your statement's compliance status is noncompliant, you can omit this line
statementVisibility: public # If set to public, the statement will be visible in production
statementCreatedDate: 2019-09-30 # In ISO format YYYY-MM-DD
statementLastUpdatedDate: 2019-09-30 # In ISO format YYYY-MM-DD
automatedTestingOnly: true # Only add this value if your service has only had automated testing. Otherwise, do not include
automatedTestingDetails: | # Only add this value if your service has only had automated testing
If your service has only had automated testing, add a text description of testing tools used, e.g.
It was tested using the automated tool(s) AATT by PayPal and Accessibility Checklist by Elsevier.If your statement is specifically for a mobile application, add the line mobilePlatform: android for an android application or
mobilePlatform: ios for an iOS application. Do not add this for web-based services.
You can also use the following files as examples to copy:
- /conf/services/example-fully-compliant.yml
- /conf/services/example-partially-compliant.yml
- /conf/services/example-non-compliant.yml
- /conf/services/example-automated-testing-only.yml
Save the YAML file to the conf/services directory.
The filename must be of the form <my-service>.yml. The name of the file will become the URL of the accessibility statement
e.g. conf/services/discounted-icecreams.yml will create an accessibility statement at
https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/accessibility-statement/discounted-icecreams.
The filename can contain only lower case letters, dashes or numbers, and the filename extension must be .yml
Before opening a pull request, check the service renders successfully at http://localhost:12346/accessibility-statement/discounted-icecreams and run the unit and integration tests locally as described below.
If your team would like repository write access to create branches and submit PRs without forking the repository, contact us via Slack at #team-plat-ui. Having write access will mean your team will receive alerts regarding production deployments.
If you do not have write access to the repository, you are welcome to fork the repository using the Github user interface and submit PRs via your forked copy. In this case you will need to contact us to request PRs are approved and merged.
Production releases for accessibility-statement-frontend are managed by PlatUI. If you would like the team to release your accessibility statement to Production, please contact us via Slack at #team-plat-ui.
Adding the accessibility statement to your service requires basic knowledge of the Play framework, the MDTP platform, and the ability and permission to build & deploy your service.
If you are using hmrc/play-ui
or hmrc/play-frontend-hmrc, you can add the
accessibility-statement.service-path key to your conf/application.conf file. This key is
the path to your accessibility statement under https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/accessibility-statement.
For example, if your accessibility statement is https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/accessibility-statement/discounted-icecreams,
this property must be set to /discounted-icecreams as follows:
accessibility-statement.service-path = "/discounted-icecreams"
Once this is set, the play-ui FooterLinks component will auto-generate the correct link to your accessibility statement, including the full referrerUrl parameter as described below. Likewise, the new hmrcStandardFooter component will deliver the full govukFooter including the standardised links.
Also available is the hmrcFooterItems helper for occasions where it is not convenient to use hmrcFooter.
If you are not able to upgrade to the minimum supported versions of play-ui or play-frontend-hmrc listed above, you will need to manually add a footer link to the accessibility statement entitled 'Accessibility statement' after the Cookies link in the gov.uk footer.
The link should have an additional querystring parameter added to help end users report any accessibility that they find. This is:
referrerUrl (the full, absolute, URI encoded page URL in your service from which the user clicked on the Accessibility link)
This will be passed through on the call to contact-frontend, for example:
http://www.tax.service.gov.uk/accessibility-statement/discounted-icecreams?referrerUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tax.service.gov.uk%2Fyour-service
will bind the following URL in your statement page
http://www.tax.service.gov.uk/contact/accessibility-unauthenticated?service=icecreams&referrerUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tax.service.gov.uk%2Fyour-service
The referrerUrl parameter should be dynamic, not hard-coded, and based on the request the user made to the page
they were visiting when clicking on the 'Accessibility statement' link. It can be constructed from the
platform.frontend.host configuration key (available only when running on the MDTP platform) and the request.path
as shown in the following code: https://github.com/hmrc/play-ui/blob/master/src/main/play-26/uk/gov/hmrc/play/config/AccessibilityStatementConfig.scala#L43
This referrerUrl parameter is important in helping HMRC customer service agents find out exactly where the
end user discovered the accessibility issue.
contactFrontendServiceId helps identify your service when members of the general public report accessibility problems.
If your service is already integrating with contact-frontend's Get help with this page form, you will find it added
as a querystring parameter service in URLs to contact-frontend.
If you look in your service's frontend source code, you should see URLs constructed similar to
s"$contactHost/contact/problem_reports_ajax?service=foo"
or
s"$contactHost/contact/problem_reports_nonjs?service=foo"
The contactFrontendServiceId here would be foo.
If your service is not already integrating with contact-frontend, we advise choosing an identifier that is specific to your service and unlikely to be used by any other service, avoiding any special characters or whitespace.
To create a version of your accessibility statement in the Welsh language, create a copy of the English language
version and save with the suffix .cy.yml. For example, if your English language statement is in
/conf/services/discounted-icecreams.yml, the Welsh version should be saved as
/conf/services/discounted-icecreams.cy.yml.
Translate the following fields into Welsh only: serviceName, serviceDescription, accessibilityProblems and milestone description. All other fields must be left untouched.
Open a PR to get the file merged into the repository. Once merged and deployed, the language toggle will automatically appear on the statement and will translate all content, including the legal text into Welsh.
To run the application:
sbt run
Navigate to the desired accessibility statement e.g. http://localhost:12346/accessibility-statement/disguised-remuneration where disguised-remuneration is the filename of the accessibility statement YAML file with the language and yaml suffix removed.
sbt test it:test
It is possible to generate a tab-separated-value (TSV) file containing information on all the accessibility statements that exist in the repository. This TSV file can then easily be imported into your favourite spreadsheet application for further analysis.
To generate the report, clone the repository locally and run
sbt generateReport
If all goes well, the report target/report.tsv will be created.
Optionally, the filename of the report can be customised. For example,
sbt "generateReport alternativeName.tsv"
will generate the report in target/alternativeName.tsv
To run the UI acceptance tests locally, you will need a copy of Chrome and the Chrome browser driver installed at /usr/local/bin/chromedriver
sbt -Dbrowser=chrome acceptance:test
The Chrome driver is available at https://chromedriver.chromium.org/
The repository https://github.com/hmrc/accessibility-statement-performance-tests contains Gatling performance tests designed to be run against a production-like environment.
While the service expects to attract a low volume of traffic, the fact that the accessibility statements load into memory at start-up means the service may require more memory than a regular service.
To run the ZAP scan, you will need a copy of the ZAP proxy running locally on port 11000: https://www.zaproxy.org/, with the following options configured:
- under HUD, uncheck 'Enable when using the ZAP Desktop' (stops ZAP converting requests to HTTPS)
- under API, check 'Disable the API key'
./run_zap_tests.sh
More information on HMRC's ZAP scanning automation library can be found at https://github.com/hmrc/zap-automation
When developing locally you can run
sm --start A11Y_STATEMENT_ALL
This is useful if you have already merged your accessibility statement into the repository and now wish to test the linking to the accessibility statement from your own service.
This code is open source software licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.