Accessibility in the public sector: What our community shared with us at Velocity
At Velocity 2025, we heard something loud and clear from our community: accessibility remains one of the biggest challenges facing digital teams. And while technology plays a role, many of the barriers are organisational and cultural.
Our conversations throughout the day with universities, local councils, and government departments painted a picture of teams that genuinely care about doing the right thing. However, they are often hindered by:
- Outdated practices
- Legacy content
- Limited resources
- Lacking influence over internal decision-making.
This blog covers the themes we've heard in person, the pain points that matter most, and where we believe we can support you more effectively. So let's dive in.
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The PDF problem: A universal challenge
No accessibility discussion is complete without the word “PDF”. Because sadly, they’re everywhere. Most often, they are ungoverned and inaccessible. According to research, 67% of PDFs encountered online were not accessible. So why do PDFs keep persisting?
Why PDFs persist
In our conversations, the same reasons for keeping PDFs came up across organisations. It's a recurring theme: a small handful of people in the digital team, battling against other departments to ban PDFs. The following were familiar struggles, mentioned by all:
- “We’ve always done it this way”
- Senior leaders prefer PDFs because they look polished
- It’s easier to export a Word document than rework content in the CMS
- Many teams are unsure about how to create an accessible PDF
PDFs continue to cause accessibility barriers, especially for users with low vision, cognitive disabilities and those relying on assistive technology.
Solving the PDF problem
What we heard again and again was that people want to solve their PDF problem, but it takes a village. Here are the common approaches digital teams feel will help:
- Better education on why PDFs create accessibility barriers
- More knowledge on why HTML is a better format to use over PDFs
- A clearer indication on when PDFs are the right format
- Support for saying “no” to PDFs when they create unnecessary barriers
- A simple way to identify which PDFs people actually access online
- Better tools to convert PDF content into accessible HTML
Across the board, the feeling was that more education was needed to sway users from PDFs to HTML.
Additional reading
We're all for encouraging web teams to remove PDFs from their website. However we do also acknowledge that on some occasions, only a PDF might do.
We've created the following resources to help web teams with PDFs. Whether you need to build a business case for removing PDFs, audit old PDF content or learn to create accessible PDFs, these articles should help.
Duplicate content: A growing challenge
With councils merging and content teams becoming more distributed, duplicate content has become a major accessibility issue in its own right.
Why duplicate content matters
It may not immediately seem like a significant issue, but duplicate content has more accessibility and SEO implications than you might think. In our discussions, it was a common issue across the board.
This is because duplicate content leads to:
- Conflicting versions of key information
- Outdated or incorrect guidance
- Missed accessibility fixes because issues appear in multiple places
- More time spent managing content, not improving it
And when sign-off workflows are long or unclear, duplicate content often sits untouched.
What digital teams need to overcome duplicate content
Without guidance, spotting duplicate content is a resource-heavy, manual task. In our discussions, it was identified that the following would help overcome duplicate content:
- Tools to help large editor bases, whilst avoiding introducing new issues
- Better ways to manage repeatable CTAs and page elements
- Clearer workflows for updating or removing outdated content
- More visibility and control across large, complex websites
Solving the duplicate content problem
This is where governance and tooling can work together. Very recently, Insytful rolled out a feature to manage this exact problem, called duplicate content detection.
In its first iteration, the feature detects duplicated page titles and descriptions. This feature enables editors to make changes while maintaining unique titles and descriptions for each page.
Accessibility confidence: From guesswork to certainty
One of the recurring questions was simple but important: “How can I be sure my content works with a screen reader?” Whilst the most straightforward answer is to test with users who rely on screen readers, the community is limited by budgets and resources.
The community shared a range of practical, manual and automated approaches, including:
- Testing with disabled users
- Lynx (text-only browser)
- Keyboard-only navigation
- Axe DevTools
- Tools such as Insytful
- WebAIM’s contrast checker
- Apple's VoiceOver and Android's TalkBack
- Support from DAC or the Zengenti Professional Services team
Automated testing alone can’t guarantee accessibility. Testing should be a combination of manual tests, testing with real people, and automated testing, all of which are essential. But editors want confidence built directly into their workflow.
Making accessibility more user-friendly for editors
A theme we heard repeatedly was that editors want accessibility to feel intuitive, not technical. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), in their raw form, are ironically not very accessible. Our aim with Insytful has always been to make digital accessibility feel accessible. We want to empower our users to focus on making fixes rather than understanding the technicalities.
There is always more that can be done to make technical content more user-friendly, and some of the improvements our community asked for included:
- A more user-friendly way to spot and replace “click here” links
- Better visibility when heading levels are skipped
- Browser plug-ins to perform quick checks
- Easier integration with form packages, so accessibility insights appear where editors already work
Whilst we currently don't have a browser plug-in, we've taken it one step further with our CMS integration into Contensis. Other third-party integrations are also available to make the workflow with Insytful even smoother, including with Jira, Google Analytics and Google's Web Risk API.
We always appreciate feedback from our community and suggestions for features. When thousands of editors use a tool, the user experience and guardrails matter. This is why we have an open roadmap, allowing any suggestion to be flagged, so the product works harder for our community.
Culture and confidence: The reality inside the public sector
Surprisingly, many accessibility challenges aren’t about technology.
The real challenges are:
- Senior stakeholders who don’t understand accessibility
- Content sign-off processes that take months
- Teams who want to improve accessibility but can’t change organisational habits
- Editors who are trying their best, but aren’t empowered to fix what they know is wrong
Similar to the PDF problem, making accessibility fixes is hindered by internal barriers. One attendee summed it up perfectly: “Most of our accessibility issues aren’t technical, they’re political.”
This is where community support and sharing experiences at events like Velocity are invaluable. Organisations learn best from each other, not from checklists.
Additional reading
When being together in person isn't an option, we have some helpful checklist resources to share:
How we move forward together
The conversations at Velocity reinforced something we already knew: improving accessibility is a shared responsibility. Reflecting on those discussions, it's clear our community is in the same boat, all dealing with:
- Growing content estates
- Huge editor bases
- Complex organisational structures
- Users with a spectrum of needs
- The requirement to do more with less
We’re here to help you overcome these challenges in meaningful ways. We plan to achieve this through enhanced features in Insytful, guidance, integrations, and more community collaboration.
Keep the conversation going
Your feedback shapes where Insytful and Contensis go next. Your openness about the challenges you face helps us understand where the real barriers lie.
If you’d like to continue the conversation, discuss a demo with us, or share examples from your own team, we’d love to hear from you.
Together, we can keep making the web more inclusive, one page, one PDF conversion, and one brave “no” at a time.
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