WCAG Accessibility standards for government sites

In my experience, accessibility is often treated as a secondary concern unless it’s a core part of the organisation’s remit, such as delivering public-facing government services like GOV.UK (see the GOV.UK Chat example below).

GOV.UK Design System is for guidance on accessibility best practices. The UK Government has done an excellent job documenting inclusive design principles that are practical and grounded in real-world use cases. They align well with WCAG standards and cover things like colour contrast, focus order, semantic markup, responsive behaviour, and assistive technology support.

Here are some resources worth checking.

GOV.UK Design System - all guidance and components
https://design-system.service.gov.uk/

GOV.UK Frontend Templates (GitHub) - accessible HTML/CSS templates used by many public sector sites
https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-frontend

One interesting piece you might notice about the GOV.UK templates is the language and tech they use, they aren’t built with React, Angular, or other modern component frameworks by default. The core of the accessible templates is written in Nunjucks, which is a templating language for HTML that works with plain JavaScript backends. It lets you generate semantic and accessible static markup without heavy client-side frameworks.

See also Gov.UK Chat (GOV.UK has entered the Chat: our vision for GOV.UK Chat – Inside GOV.UK) built with accessibility in mind yet still delivering interactive UX unlike many Gov sites which are static.