Accessibility – UserWay

Our sites use UserWay, an accessibility overlay widget, to give visitors extra tools for reading and navigating the site – such as text resizing, contrast adjustment, cursor and reading guides, and screen reader compatibility improvements.

How it works for visitors

• UserWay appears as a small icon (usually bottom corner of the screen) that visitors can click to open the accessibility menu.
• From there, visitors can adjust things like font size, contrast, spacing, and enable features such as a reading guide or a pause on animations – all without needing to change any site-wide settings themselves.
• It’s installed sitewide via script, so editors don’t need to add anything to individual pages for it to appear – it should show automatically on every page once active.

What UserWay does and doesn’t cover

• Important: UserWay is a helpful addition, but it isn’t a substitute for building accessible content in the first place. Overlay tools like this are widely understood to only address a portion of accessibility issues – they can’t fix, for example, a missing alt text description, poor heading structure, or a low-contrast colour combination baked into the design.
• Editors should still follow good practice regardless of the overlay being present:
  • Correct, sequential heading structure (see the Formatting section)
  • Descriptive link text rather than “click here”
  • Alt text on all meaningful images (see below)
  • Sufficient colour contrast when choosing custom colours

Alt text on images

While not exclusive to UserWay, this is worth including here: every meaningful image should have alt text set (in the image block’s sidebar, under “Alt text (alternative text)”), describing what the image shows for anyone using a screen reader. Purely decorative images (e.g. a background pattern with no informational content) can be left blank, but content-carrying images – diagrams, photos relevant to the text, scanned documents – should always have a clear, concise description.

Tip: If an image is also a link (e.g. a clickable logo), the alt text should describe where the link goes, not just what the image looks like.