Description:
As a senior accessibility specialist at GDS you’ll work in multidisciplinary teams, alongside researchers and developers, to deliver world-class, user centred public services.
You’ll help identify and fix some of the toughest problems in public infrastructure and you will be focussing on design of services at scale. You’ll help the government transform the way it delivers services, so that they’re more efficient, simpler, faster and easier to use.
As a Senior Accessibility Specialist you’ll:
- work with Design Leads and Head of Design to define and establish accessibility best practice for GOV.UK
- identify and implement ways to champion and embed accessibility in regular practice for all GOV.UK colleagues
- share accessibility knowledge within GOV.UK and across GDS, provide accessibility advice and increase capability and raise awareness
- write guidance and documentation and advise on latest WCAG
- organise training and help build accessibility capacity across GOV.UK
- assess products for accessibility best practices and conformance with accessibility standards
- consult product teams, help them meet accessibility standards and best practices
- review implementations using a range of techniques including design reviews, automated testing and manual code inspection
- recommend solutions for code, design and content to be as accessible as possible
- benchmark and track the success of interventions to embed accessibility practices
- liaise with commercial teams to support the procurement of compliant, accessible and inclusive software and services, and can be incorporated into our code deployment pipeline
- arrange yearly accessibility audit for GOV.UK by procuring audit services and collaborating with them during the audit
- interpret and prioritise the result of the GOV.UK accessibility audit
Person specification
We’re interested in people who have:
- familiarity with front-end development technologies, specifically HTML, CSS, JavaScript and WAI-ARIA
- expert knowledge of existing and emerging accessibility guidelines and standards, particularly the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1
- demonstrable experience of evaluating the accessibility of digital websites and providing feedback, advice and solutions to help fix identified issues
- knowledge and experience of testing with a range of assistive technologies including customised browser settings, screen magnification, screen readers, speech recognition and literacy software
- proven experience of collaborating with delivery teams to identify and fix accessibility barriers and raise accessibility capability
- demonstrable ability to write accessibility guidance and documentation, and deliver accessibility training and presentations
- experience working in flexible, agile environments and multi-disciplinary teams
- Strong negotiation skills to ensure that accessibility concerns are treated with an appropriate degree of priority
- Experience of working in government
- Experience of delivering digital services on multiple, complex or large scale end-to-end services in large organisations