Home Office: Digital Technology

(asked on 1st September 2023) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps their Department is taking to improve its digital services to provide better (a) accessibility and (b) user experience for the public.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 11th September 2023

The Home Office Digital, Data and Technology strategy refers to accessibility several times and we have published our Accessibility Standard and guidance.

Our Accessibility Assurance team has 4 consultants. They drive greater accessibility of the products developed/procured/used by Home Office, to reduce the risks that disabled people cannot use our services. ​They improve the capability, confidence and culture of teams to meet our Accessibility Standard and legal requirements.​ Together we develop and embed the standard into processes and professions, then assess the efficacy of controls to meet it​.

For example our intranet team recently influenced Microsoft to fix a number of accessibility issues in SharePoint which will benefit our own users and others around the world.

We provide a monthly Introduction to Accessibility course that is open to all staff and mandatory for those working in user centred design. After a year of training our Quality Assurance and Test colleagues, embedded in delivery teams, have taken on primary responsibility for testing against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

We are organisational members of the International Association for Accessibility Professionals and the Business Disablity Forum as well as managing the cross-government accessibility community. We use these to stay abreast of the latest thinking and good practices.We are also working strategically across government on procurement policy, to get the commercial sector to supply accessible products for staff and public users.

User-centred design (UCD) and accessibility are integral to our approach to improve usability of the Home Office's digital services. We are committed to making our services and products more usable in our Home Office Digital, Data and Technology strategy and departmental outcome delivery plan.

The Home Office has a thriving community of over 300 practitioners in UCD, which comprises User Research, Interaction Design, Service Design and Content Design roles. Our UCD practitioners are deployed across projects in migration and borders, public protection and internal services. There is a professional support and management structure in place to oversee and develop our practice and provide assurance, tools and training to ensure our work is of high quality.

Our community of practitioners follow the best practice from the Government Service Standard, which places the emphasis on understanding user's needs. We also have a usability testing facility in Croydon and we are a Market Research Society Company Partner.

Our current focus in UCD is growing our community through permanent recruitment and our digital development programme.

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