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Traffic Suite accessibility statement

 

This accessibility statement covers the ‘Consultation’ and ‘Streets’ products. These are public-facing services that make up part of the Traffic Suite.

  • Our ‘Consultation’ product allows for the collation and analysis of feedback from the public and stakeholders on traffic order changes.
  • ‘Streets’ simplifies traditionally complex traffic order data and presents this information in a dynamic, easy-to-use authority-wide map of active restrictions.

The Traffic Suite products are run by Yellow Line Parking Ltd (AppyWay). We want as many people as possible to be able to use our products. For example, that means you should be able to:

  • zoom in up to 500% without the enlarged text breaking the user interface
  • navigate all of the website using just a keyboard
  • navigate most of the website using speech recognition software
  • listen to most of the website using a screen reader 

The Traffic Suite of products has been designed to be simple and intuitive to use, both for authority employees and for the wider public when they interact with the public-facing portals, ‘Consultation’ and ‘Streets’.

Design principles

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 are an internationally recognised set of recommendations for improving web accessibility. AppyWay product development considers accessibility and intuitive user experiences and interfaces, which have been embedded from product ideation.  AppyWay’s product design and development teams are conscious that 1 in 5 people in the UK has a long-term illness, impairment or disability that could impact their ability to interact with web or mobile applications. All our products, whether designed for local authority users or for the general public, take advantage of our innovative technology platform and user-led design process to ensure they are as usable, intuitive and as accessible as possible.

WCAG 2.1 is based on 4 design principles, chosen to emphasise the need for organisations to think about the different ways that people interact with their applications and content: 

  • Perceivable
    – Users need to be able to recognise and use your service with the senses that are available to them.

  • Operable
    – Users can find and use your content, regardless of how they choose to access it.

  • Understandable
    – Users can understand your content and how the service works.

  • Robust
    – Content can be interpreted reliably by a wide variety of user agents, including widely available and older versions of web browsers.

Using this structure, it is possible to share examples and explanations for how AppyWay’s two public-facing web portals, ‘Public Consultation’ and ‘Streets’ adhere to the WCAG 2.1.

Perceivable 

Key considerations for ensuring that the valuable restriction information contained within our map-based portals is clear, easy to understand and distinguishable include the application of colours and shapes.

During development and extensive user testing, the optimal combination of base map styling and colour palette was achieved. Providing the right contrast ratios and combination of colours so that users could clearly distinguish restrictions, particularly where many restrictions are located across a congested area of a map, was an important objective for the design and development teams.

More specifically within the ‘Public Consultation’ portal, in addition to the colours used, we further improved the accessibility experience for users by including lettered labels for every restriction type being added, modified or removed within the proposed consultation. 

Other relevant examples of conformity to the WCAG 2.1 under this design principle include:

  • Alt-texts used extensively throughout both portals
  • Logical structure of content ensured throughout user experience to aid screen readers
  • Fully responsive design for both web portals ensures: 
    – 500% zoom magnification is supported across all features
    – All user devices used to access the portals are supported (mobile, tablet, desktop)
    – Font size can be easily increased

Operable

The development of our public-facing portals included extensive user testing to ensure that the user experience was intuitive, making it easy to move through the maps and surface the detailed information in a way that makes sense.

The portals use meaningful headings and labels with matching accessible labels to ensure there are seamless experiences for all types of users. Users can use keyboard commands to navigate through the well-structured content.

For downloadable content, the user interface and labelling have been optimised to ensure users are able to clearly locate and download the relevant documents associated with made or proposed orders.

Understandable

AppyWay’s user-led design process, conducted in partnership with a number of local authorities, surfaced a number of opportunities to make traffic order data and processes more easily understandable for the public. There is nomenclature and legislative language that can make the subject more difficult for regular members of the public to engage with. AppyWay maintains a desire to improve understanding of Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) processes via our intuitive web portals. This aligns well with this design principle of the WCAG 2.1 to make sure people can understand the content contained within our applications.

Plain English is used throughout as extensively as is possible, with short sentences and terminology that is easy to understand.

Making sure features look consistent and behave in predictable ways is a core competency under this design principle. With a map-based interface, our design process prioritised ensuring that features looked consistent and behaved in predictable ways across both ‘Public Consultation’ and ‘Streets’.

This is perhaps best reinforced in our design objective to simplify the number of unique restriction types visualised within the portals. This reduced the number of colours required to be used across the maps, making conforming to accessibility standards easier. This improves consistency and the overall experience for users navigating the maps.

In other TRO solution offerings, it is sometimes possible for authorities to tailor colour and pattern options for specific restrictions when they configure their public facing portals. This has resulted in a lack of consistency in how restrictions are visualised on maps between different authorities. We believe our design and development teams, who are intimately familiar with WCAG standards, are better suited to refining an accessible colour configuration, rather than leave these choices to be made by each authority team. 

The benefit of this design approach is that traffic order data visualised via AppyWay’s public-facing portal ‘Streets’ is consistent across all authorities using our solution, making it easier for the public to understand restrictions in the areas they live, work and regularly visit.

Robust

Our public facing portals are usable by all versions of the major web browsers and our engineering team have an advanced roadmap that is able to anticipate and adapt to any browser developments and advancement in assistive technologies.

Both portals are coded in such a way to aid assistive technologies that support users with impairments.

How accessible this website is

Because of the nature of the product, some parts of the Traffic Suite are not fully compliant with the WCAG:

Colour contrast

Because of the vast amount of data displayed within our products, we require an extensive colour palette to distinguish between different items on the map, not all of which are viewed as accessible. Users can, however, understand restriction types by hovering over (within ‘Consultation’) or clicking on these (within ‘Streets’) to reveal text information regarding that restriction. In ‘Consultation’ each restriction also has a letter label that corresponds with a text description in the legend. Key considerations for ensuring that the valuable restriction information contained within our map-based portals is clear, easy to understand and distinguishable include the application of colours and shapes.

During development and extensive user testing, we consider frequency of restriction type, commonly adjacent restrictions and existing colour conventions (such as blue for blue badge holders and yellow for yellow lines). 

Ensuring the contrast ratios and combination of colours were such that users could clearly distinguish restrictions, even where many restrictions are located across a congested area of a map. 

Feedback and contact information

If you need information on this website in a different format (like accessible PDF, large print etc.), please email the associated local authority who will assist you.

Reporting accessibility problems with this website

We’re always looking to improve the accessibility of this website. If you find any problems not listed on this page, contact support@appyway.com

Disproportionate burden

We are currently unable to fix structuring issues regarding landmarks and the hierarchy of titles after level 1 (levels 2-5). This would require a significant redesign of the layout of each page. The purpose of this is to best display simple and easy to use interactive maps.  

Interactive tools and transactions

Because our products are predominantly interactive map-based tools, whilst you can navigate, search and zoom within the map just using a keyboard, you are unable to select the individual bays in order to provide further information without the use of a mouse. 

PDFs and other documents

All documentation associated with a particular traffic order is made available in an accessible PDF format, compatible with most screen readers and other assistive technology. However, maps within these documents are included as an image and not accompanied by any text description. Please contact your local authority if you require this in another format or an accompanying text description.

What we’re doing to improve accessibility

We continue to work towards the WCAG 2.1 standards where possible, as well as take feedback from our local authority customers to address any needs they may have in order to improve accessibility. Furthermore, we’re continually testing all product development with a wide spectrum of users, as well as taking ongoing feedback from our customers. 

Preparation of this accessibility statement

This statement was prepared on 14 March 2022. It was last reviewed on 14 March 2022. This website was last tested on 14 March 2022. Testing was carried out by AppyWay itself.