Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps will her Department take to improve the accessibility of the Access to Work Scheme for visually impaired people.

DWP is committed to ensuring that the Access to Work (AtW) scheme is accessible to visually impaired people. We work closely with stakeholders (including organisations who support blind and visually impaired people) to identify and deliver improvements to the scheme to broaden its accessibility and reach.

Recent accessibility improvements include:

• completing work to ensure our online application journey is compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidance (v 2.1); ensuring the service works with all major screen readers, screen magnifiers and other assistive software
• creating accessible versions of four Access to Work claim forms. These products are compatible with popular assistive software such as JAWS, Windows NVDA and Zoomtext. Customers can also request versions in a format of their choice if these do not meet their needs.

In addition, we are currently developing an online journey to enable citizens to claim the grant; this will be fully accessible and allow users to submit claims, check the status of claims and view their remaining grant. We have done extensive user research and prototype testing with users who have visual impairments to ensure the future service meets their needs. We are also discussing ways of reducing the amount of invoices and other evidence users might need to upload or supply; ensuring a more inclusive service across all channels.

To raise awareness of the scheme, Access to Work was supported with paid campaign activity that ran between 24 February and 31 March, and the Department continues to assess how the scheme can be promoted to support both those with visual impairment and people with other disabilities and health conditions. The campaign ran across a broad channel mix to reach a wide but targeted audience. To coincide with the Access to Work campaign launch, we also produced a new Access to Work toolkit. This was shared with a wide range of stakeholders, including Business Disability Forum, Disability Benefits Consortium (DBC), Disability Rights UK and the RNIB.