My colleague, Content Designer Francesca Scavone, and I recently had the opportunity to lead work with a team transforming a paper-based application process for providing temporary accommodation, working with HMPPS (His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service).
This project, from its early Alpha stage through to a recent Private Beta, focused on designing for accessibility throughout, with work needed to adapt elements of the GOV.UK Design System patterns to best meet accessibility needs for a diverse workforce.
Designing with accessibility in mind
From the very beginning, our focus was on designing a digital solution to best meet user needs. We recognised that the people using this service often faced unique challenges – in this case, Information Officers in prisons and courts who act as ‘referrers’ on behalf of defendants and assessors who receive the referrals.
Through initial research, we learned that existing paper forms had unclear questions and content that people found hard to understand. This was an important starting point for accessibility, where our goal was to simplify and clarify the application process as much as possible – framing questions and presenting information in ways that would enable referrers in the court system and prisons to provide the necessary information effectively.
During Alpha work this involved multiple design iterations, challenging assumptions, and ensuring that every piece of information being requested had a clear purpose. We focused on reducing requests for more information from assessors by incorporating the prompts they typically used directly into the new form. This approach will eventually reduce the back-and-forth in assessing completed applications, especially in courts, making the process smoother and more efficient for users under significant time-pressures.
Designing for situational access needs
Accessibility was explicitly considered in our user research recruitment. We aimed to include participants with a range of access needs, starting by using an accessibility calculator to estimate potential needs based on the service's likely future user base. This proactive planning allowed us to identify and target specific types of impairments, ensuring that designs were tested with people who genuinely represented the diverse needs of our users. We also considered users who may have situational access needs such as constant distractions, stress and repetitive strain injury (RSI).
A good example of our early accessibility considerations was how we designed for situational access needs, including those affecting administrative roles. We deliberately made design choices to reduce the impact of repetitive strain injury (RSI), arthritis, colour blindness, eye strain, and memory impairments. We:
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repeated form guidance at different stages in the digital application process so users didn't have to recall information
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avoided using colour alone to convey meaning and used complementary colours (like blue and orange, or blue and yellow) for 'statuses' to accommodate different types of colour blindness
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reduced the number of questions and facilitated time-saving behaviours such as copying and pasting
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added ‘relevance checks’ meaning if the question was irrelevant to the defendant, users could skip it.
Adapting GOV.UK Design System patterns
We had to explore deviations from standard GOV.UK Design System patterns to meet needs – finding during testing that the standard 'warning text' might be too strong for certain messages in this user context, while 'inset text' was too subtle and could be missed in large portions of text. In response to this, we created a different colour inset text, working from the assumption that parts of the service were text heavy, making them harder to understand.
Based on our earlier research, we also identified the need to pull out some guidance in form flows, again, deviating from GOV.UK patterns. This was due to existing GOV.UK components using a warning component with a visual exclamation point. It was important not to alarm users unnecessarily, as some interactions held consequences but with a lower risk. Therefore, this required a visual treatment to reinforce messaging in a softer way but while still holding visual weight. This meant when we used the warning text component to highlight something more serious, such as a legal or a safety risk, this information stood out from other important guidance.
We designed, tested and settled on a middle ground approach, using a more subtly colour-treated inset text; which is also used by some other services on GOV.UK, but is not part of the standard design system. This was eventually used as part of Private Beta, where we validated that this was the best approach to get people's attention, but without alarming them. This component also worked well for users who had dyslexia and users who struggled to process large bodies of text as it reduced referential glances and made it more noticeable.
Importantly, we contributed this pattern work back to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Design System team, highlighting these deviations from GOV.UK patterns in both our Alpha documentation, and in our Private Beta service assessment, where we focussed on the product build, with continuous improvement based on user feedback.
Meeting WCAG 2.2
Another notable accessibility challenge emerged during Beta as we built the first version of the service ready for Private Beta. This concerned conditional questions revealed by radio buttons, which were flagged as not meeting WCAG 2.2 standards in our accessibility audit. This is a known wider issue across government digital services using these patterns, and while a full retroactive fix was too time intensive for our team given the number of instances, we thoroughly investigated solutions and acknowledged the issue in our service's accessibility statement. Again, we shared our findings and a potential fix to explore with both MoJ teams and GDS (Government Digital Service), contributing to the ongoing improvement of the GOV.UK Design System itself. This demonstrated our commitment not just to our service being accessible, but to raising the bar for accessibility across government.
A new service designed to work for all
The journey of our work from Alpha to Private Beta has shown the real impact of prioritising and focussing on accessibility, ensuring that our work also benefits other teams across government.
We successfully passed a MoJ Beta service assessment first time, a testament to the thoroughness of our documentation and this ongoing commitment to building a fully accessible service. The Beta assessment panel praised the depth and quality of work, acknowledging the progress made. By adapting and even helping to evolve the GOV.UK Design System, this work is a good example that building services for everyone, regardless of their access needs or situational constraints, is achievable with the right approaches, and commitment to accessibility.
