MidCentral District Health Board

A public health website that does meet web accessibility standards

The MidCentral District Health Board website has accessibility issues from a visual design and HTML mark-up perspective. (1)

This webpage has no mobile-first strategy to provide for mobile device usage, which dominates at around 51.5% of global traffic. (2)

At the time of writing this article, Axe for chrome found 78 accessibility issues. (3)

Input fields

The search input field does not have a required label to allow screen readers to voice the input prompt for the user. The Label should describe in sufficient detail the input required from the user.

Links

Multiple links contain images. Neither the links have text, titles, or aria-labels visible for screen readers, and images are missing alternative text. The semantics of the links do not use the role of 'presentation' or 'none'. 

Landmarks

The document has no 'main' landmark. Content is not contained within HTML landmarks. A 'main' landmark will provide a navigation point to the page's primary content for users of assistive technologies. Content contained within landmarks will allow a user to navigate to a section based on the landmark. 

Headings

There is no Level 1 heading. Screen reader users can use shortcuts to navigate directly to the first h1, which, in principle, should allow them to jump directly to the web page's primary content. 

Considering this is a New Zealand Government-funded website associated with access to health care, this organisation should evaluate their website strategy and consider accessibility for assistive technologies and the implementation of the current HTML5 mark-up.